But it chanced that Norman met her in the street about an hour after Tetlow's call.
He was on the way to lunch at the Lawyer's Club—one of those apparent luxuries that are the dire and pitiful necessities of men in New York fighting to maintain the semblance and the reputation of prosperity. It must not be imagined by those who are here let into Norman's inmost secrets that his appearance betrayed the depth to which he had fallen. At least to the casual eye he seemed the same rich and powerful personage. An expert might have got at a good part of the truth from his somber eyes and haggard face, from the subtle transformation of the former look of serene pride into the bravado of pretense. And as, in a general way, the facts of his fall were known far and wide, all his acquaintances understood that his seeming of undiminished success was simply the familiar "bluff." Its advantage to him with them lay in its raising a doubt as to just what degree of disaster it hid—no small advantage. Nor was this "bluff" altogether for the benefit of the outside world. It made his fall less hideously intolerable to himself. In the bottom of his heart he knew that when drink and no money should finally force him to release his relaxing hold upon his fashionable clubs, upon luxurious attire and habits, he would suddenly and with accelerated speed drop into the abyss—We have all caught glimpses of that abyss—frayed fine linen cheaply laundered, a tie of one time smartness showing signs of too long wear, a suit from the best kind of tailor with shiny spot glistening here, patch peeping there, a queer unkemptness about the hair and skin—these the beginnings of a road that leads straight and short to the barrel-house, the park bench, and the police station. Because, when a man strikes into that stretch of the road to perdition, he ceases to be one of our friends, passes from view entirely, we have the habit ofsayingthat such things rarely if ever happen. But weknowbetter. Many's the man now high who has had the sort of drop Norman was taking. We remember when he was making a bluff such as Norman was making in those days; but we think now that we were mistaken in having suspected it of being bluff.
Norman, dressed with more than ordinary care—how sensitive a man becomes about those things when there is neither rustle nor jingle in his pockets, and his smallest check would be returned with the big black stamp "No Funds"—Norman, groomed to the last button, was in Broadway near Rector Street. Ahead of him he saw the figure of a girl—a trim, attractive figure, slim and charmingly long of line. A second glance, and he recognized her. What was the change that had prevented his recognizing her at once? He had not seen that particular lightish-blue dress before—nor the coquettish harmonizing hat. But that was not the reason. No, it was the coquetry in her toilet—the effort of the girl to draw attention to her charms by such small devices as are within the reach of extremely modest means. He did not like this change. It offended his taste; it alarmed his jealousy.
He quickened his step, and when almost at her side spoke her name—"Miss Hallowell."
She stopped, turned. As soon as she recognized him there came into her quiet, lovely face a delightful smile. He could not conceal his amazement. She was glad to see him! Instantly, following the invariable habit of an experienced analytical mind, he wondered for what unflattering reason this young woman who did not like him was no longer showing it, was seeming more than a little pleased to see him. "Why, how d'ye do, Mr. Norman?" said she. And her friendliness and assurance of manner jarred upon him. There was not a suggestion of forwardness; but he, used to her old-time extreme reserve, felt precisely as if she were bold and gaudy, after the fashion of so many of the working girls who were popular with the men.
This unfavorable impression disappeared—or, rather, retired to the background—even as it became definite. And once more he was seeing the charms of physical loveliness, of physical—and moral, and mental—mystery that had a weird power over him. As they shook hands, a quiver shot through him as at the shock of a terrific stimulant; and he stood there longing to take her in his arms, to feel the delicate yet perfect and vividly vital life of that fascinating form—longing to kiss that sensitive, slightly pouted rosy mouth, to try to make those clear eyes grow soft and dreamy——
She was saying: "I've been wondering what had become of you."
"I saw Tetlow," he said. "He promised to send me your address."
At Tetlow's name she frowned slightly; then a gleam of ridicule flitted into her eyes. "Oh, that silly, squeamish old maid! How sick I got of him!"
Norman winced, and his jealousy stirred. "Why?" he asked.
"Always warning me against everybody. Always giving me advice. It was too tiresome. And at last he began to criticize me—the way I dressed—the way I talked—said I was getting too free in my manner. The impudence of him!"
Norman tried to smile.
"He'd have liked me to stay a silly little mouse forever."
"So you've been—blossoming out?" said Norman.
"In a quiet way," replied she, with a smile of self-content, so lovely as a smile that no one would have minded its frank egotism. "There isn't much chance for fun—unless a girl goes too far. But at the same time I don't intend life to be Sunday when it isn't work. I got very cross with him—Mr. Tetlow, I mean. And I took another position. It didn't pay quite so well—only fifteen a week. But I couldn't stand being watched—and guyed by all the other girls and boys for it."
"Where are you working?"
"With an old lawyer named Branscombe. It's awful slow, as I'm the only one, and he's old and does everything in an old-fashioned way. But the hours are easy, and I don't have to get down till nine—which is nice when you've been out at a dance the night before."
Norman kept his eyes down to hide from her the legion of devils of jealousy. "Youhavechanged," he said.
"I'm growing up," replied she with a charming toss of her small head—what beautiful effects the sunlight made in among those wavy strands and strays!
"And you're as lovely as ever—lovelier," he said—and his eyes were the eyes of the slave she had spurned.
She did not spurn him now—and it inflamed his jealousy that she did not. She said: "Oh, what's the good of looks? The town's full of pretty girls. And so many of them have money—which I haven't. To make a hit in New York a girl's got to have both looks and dress. But I must be going. I've an engagement to lunch—" She gave a proud little smile—"at the Astor House. It's nice upstairs there."
"With Bob Culver?"
She laughed. "I haven't seen him since I left his office. You know, Mr. Tetlow took me with him—back to your old firm. I didn't like Mr. Culver. I don't care for those black men. They are bad-tempered and two-faced. Anyhow, I'd not have anything to do with a man who wanted to slip round with me as if he were ashamed of me."
She was looking at Norman pleasantly enough. He wasn't sure that the hit was for him as well as for Culver, but he flushed deeply. "Will you lunch with me at the Astor House at one to-morrow?"
"I've got an engagement," said she. "And I must be going. I'm awfully late." He had an instinct that her engagement on both days was with the same man. "I'm glad to have seen you——"
"Won't you let me call on you?" he said imploringly, but with the suggestion that he had no hope of being permitted to come.
"Certainly," responded she with friendly promptness. She opened the shopping bag swinging on her arm. "Here is one of my cards."
"When? This evening?"
Her laugh showed the beautiful deep pink and dazzling white behind her lips. "No—I'm going to a party."
"Let me take you."
She shook her head. "You wouldn't like it. Only young people."
"But I'm not so old."
She looked at him critically. "No—you're not. It always puzzled me. You aren't old—you look like a boy lots of the time. But you alwaysseemold to me."
"I'll try to do better. To-night?"
"Not to-night," laughed she. "Let's see—to-morrow's Sunday. Come to-morrow—about half past two."
"Thank you," he said so gratefully that he cursed himself for his folly as he heard his voice—the idiotic folly of so plainly betraying his feelings. No wonder she despised him! Beginning again—and beginning; wrong.
"Good-by." Her eyes, her smile flashed and he was alone, watching her slender grace glide through the throngs of lower Broadway.
At his office again at three, he found a note from Tetlow inclosing another of Dorothy's cards and also the promised check. Into his face came the look that always comes into the faces of the prisoners of despair when the bolts slide back and the heavy door swings and hope stands on the threshold instead of the familiar grim figure of the jailer. "This looks like the turn of the road," he muttered. Yes, a turn it certainly was—but was ittheturn? "I'll know more as to that," said he with a glance at the clock, "about this time to-morrow."
It was a boarding house on the west side. And when the slovenly, smelly maid said, "Go right up to her room," he knew it was—probably respectable, but not rigidly respectable. However, working girls must receive, and they cannot afford parlors and chaperons. Still—It was no place for a lovely young girl, full of charm and of love of life—and not brought up in the class where the women are trained from babyhood to protect themselves.
He ascended two flights, knocked at the door to the rear. "Come!" called a voice, and he entered. It was a small neat room, arranged comfortably and with some taste. He recognized at first glance many little things from her room in the Jersey City house—things he had provided for her. On the chimney piece was a large photograph of her father—Norman's eyes hastily shifted from that. The bed was folded away into a couch—for space and for respectability. At first he did not see her. But when he advanced a step farther, she was disclosed in the doorway of a deep closet that contained a stationary washstand.
He had never seen her when she was not fully dressed. He was now seeing her in a kind of wrapper—of pale blue, clean but not fresh. It was open at the throat; its sleeves fell away from her arms. And, to cap the climax of his agitation, her hair, her wonderful hair, was flowing loosely about her face and shoulders.
"What's the matter with you?" she cried laughingly. Her eyes sparkled and danced; the waves of her hair, each hair standing out as if it were alive, sparkled and danced. It was a smile never to be forgotten. "Why are you so embarrassed?"
He was embarrassed. He was thrilled. He was enraged—enraged because, if she would thus receive him whom she did not like, she would certainly thus receive any man.
"I don't mind you," she went on, mockingly. "I'd have to be careful if it was one of the boys."
"Do you receive the—boys—here?" demanded he glumly, his voice arrogant with the possessive rights a man feels when he cares for a woman, whether she cares for him or not.
"Why not?" scoffed she. "Where else would I see them? I don't make street corner dates, thank you. You're as bad as fat, foolish Mr. Tetlow."
"I beg your pardon," said he humbly.
She straightway relented, saying: "Of course I'd not let one of the boys come up when I was dressed like this. But I didn't mindyou." He winced at this amiable, unconscious reminder of her always exasperating and tantalizing and humiliating indifference to him—"And as I'm going to a grand dance to-night I simply had to wash my hair. Does that satisfy you, Mr. Primmey?"
He hid the torment of his reopened wound and seated himself at the center table. She returned to a chair in the window where the full force of the afternoon sun would concentrate upon her hair. And he gazed spell bound. He had always known that her hair was fine. He had never dreamed it was like this. It was thick, it was fine and soft. In color, as the sunbeams streamed upon it, it was all the shades of gold and all the other beautiful shades between brown and red. It fell about her face, about her neck, about her shoulders in a gorgeous veil. And her pure white skin—It was an even more wonderful white below the line of her collar—where he had never seen it before. Such exquisitely modeled ears—such a delicate nose—and the curve of her cheeks—and the glory of her eyes! He clinched his teeth and his hands, sat dumb with his gaze down.
"How do you like my room?" she chattered on. "It's not so bad—really quite comfortable—though I'm afraid I'll be cold when the weather changes. But it's the best I can do. As it is, I don't see how I'm going to make ends meet. I pay twelve of my fifteen for this room and two meals. The rest goes for lunch and car fare. As soon as I have to get clothes—" She broke off, laughing.
"Well," he said, "what then?"
"I'm sure I don't know," replied she carelessly. "Perhaps old Mr. Branscombe'll give me a raise. Still, eighteen or twenty is the most I could hope for—and that wouldn't mean enough for clothes."
She shook her head vigorously and her hair stood out yet more vividly and the sunbeams seemed to go mad with joy as they danced over and under and through it. He had ventured to glance up; again he hastily looked down.
"You spoiled me," she went on. "Those few months over there in Jersey City. It madesucha change in me, though I didn't realize it at the time. You see, I hadn't known since I was a tiny little girl what it was to live really decently, and so I was able to get along quite contentedly. I didn't know any better." She made a wry face. "How I loathe the canned and cold storage stuff I have to eat nowadays. And how I do miss the beautiful room I had in that big house over there! and how I miss Molly and Pat—and the garden—and doing as I pleased—and the clothes I had: I thought I was being careful and not spoiling myself. You may not believe it, but I was really conscientious about spending money." She laughed in a queer, absent way. "I had such a funny idea of what I had a right to do and what I hadn't. And I didn't spend so very much on out-and-out luxury. But—enough to spoil me for this life."
As Norman listened, as he noted—in her appearance, manner, way of talking—the many meaning signs of the girl hesitating at the fork of the roads—he felt within him the twinges of fear, of jealousy—and through fear and jealousy, the twinges of conscience. She was telling the truth. He had undermined her ability to live in purity the life to which her earning power assigned her. . . .Whyhad she been so friendly to him? Why had she received him in this informal, almost if not quite inviting fashion?
"So you think I've changed?" she was saying. "Well—I have. Gracious, what a little fool I was!"
His eyes lifted with an agonized question in them.
She flushed, glanced away, glanced at him again with the old, sweet expression of childlike innocence which had so often made him wonder whether it was merely a mannerism, or was a trick, or was indeed a beam from a pure soul. "I'm foolish still—in certain ways," she said significantly.
"And you always intend to be?" suggested he with a forced smile.
"Oh—yes," replied she—positively enough, yet it somehow had not the full force of her simple short statements in the former days.
He believed her. Perhaps because he wished to believe, must believe, would have been driven quite mad by disbelief. Still, he believed. As yet she was good. But it would not last much longer. With him—or with some other. If with him, then certainly afterward with another—with others. No matter how jealously he might guard her, she would go that road, if once she entered it. If he would have her for his very own he must strengthen her, not weaken her, must keep her "foolish still—in certain ways."
He said: "There's nothing in the other sort of life."
"That's what they say," replied she, with ominous irritation. "Still—some girls—lotsof girls seem to get on mighty well without being so terribly particular."
"You ought to see them after a few years."
"I'm only twenty-one," laughed she. "I've got lots of time before I'm old. . . . You haven't—married?"
"No," said he.
"I thought I'd have heard, if you had." She laughed queerly—again shook out her hair, and it shimmered round her face and over her head and out from her shoulders like flames. "You've got a kind of a—Mr. Tetlow way of talking. It doesn't remind me of you as you were in Jersey City."
She said nothing, she suggested nothing that had the least impropriety in it, or faintest hint of impropriety. It was nothing positive, nothing aggressive, but a certain vague negative something that gave him the impression of innocence still innocent but looking or trying to look tolerantly where it should not. And he felt dizzy and sick, stricken with shame and remorse and jealous fear. Yes—she was sliding slowly, gently, unconsciously down to the depth in which he had been lying, sick and shuddering—no, to deeper depths—to the depths where there is no light, no trace of a return path. And he had started her down. He had done it when he, in his pride and selfishness, had ignored what the success of his project would mean for her. But he knew now; in bitterness and shame and degradation he had learned. "I was infamous!" he said to himself.
She began to talk in a low, embarrassed voice:
"Sometimes I think of getting married. There's a young man—a young lawyer—he makes twenty-five a week, but it'll be years and years before he has a good living. A man doesn't get on fast in New York unless he has pull."
Norman, roused from his remorse, blazed inside. "You are in love with him?"
She laughed, and he could not tell whether it was to tease him or to evade.
"You'd not care about him long," said Norman, "unless there were more money coming in than he'd be likely to get soon. Love without money doesn't go—at least, not in New York."
"Do you suppose I don't know that?" said she with the irritation of one faced by a hateful fact. "Still—I don't see what to do."
Norman, biting his lip and fuming and observing her with jealous eyes, said in the best voice he could command, "How long have you been in love with him?"
"Did I say I was in love?" mocked she.
"You didn't say you weren't. Who is he?"
"If you'll stay on about half an hour or so, you'll see him. No—you can't. I've got to get dressed before I let him up. He has very strict ideas—where I'm concerned."
"Then why did you letmecome up?" Norman said, with a penetrating glance.
She lowered her gaze and a faint flush stole into her cheeks. Was it confession of the purpose he suspected? Or, was it merely embarrassment?
"I heard of a case once," continued Norman, his gaze significantly direct, "the case of a girl who was in love with a poor young fellow. She wanted money—luxury. Also, she wanted the poor young fellow."
The color flamed into the girl's face, then left it pale. Her white fingers fluttered with nervous grace into her masses of hair and back to her lap again, to rest there in timid quiet.
"She knew another man," pursued Norman, "one who was able to give her what she wanted in the way of comfort. So, she decided to make an arrangement with the man, and keep it hidden from her lover—and in that way get along pleasantly until her lover was in better circumstances ."
Her gaze was upon her hands, listless in her lap. He felt that he had spoken her unspoken, probably unformed thoughts. Yes, unformed. Men and women, especially women, habitually pursued these unacknowledged and—even unformed purposes, in their conflicts of the desire to get what they wanted and their desire to appear well to themselves.
"What would you think of an arrangement like that?" asked he, determined to draw her secret heart into the open where he could see, where she could see.
She lifted frank, guileless eyes to his. "I suppose the girl was trying to do the best she could."
"What do you think of a girl who'd do that?"
"I don't judge anybody—any more. I've found out that this world isn't at all as I thought—as I was taught."
"Wouldyoudo it?"
She smiled faintly. "No," she replied uncertainly. Then she restored his wavering belief in her essential honesty and truthfulness by adding: "That is to say, I don't think I would."
She busied herself with her hair, feeling it to see whether it was not yet dry, spreading it out. He looked at her unseeingly. At last she said: "You must go. I've got to get dressed."
"Yes—I must be going," said he absently, rising and reaching for his hat on the center table.
She stood up, put out her hand. "I'm glad you came."
"Thank you," said he, still in the same abstraction. He shook hands with her, moved hesitatingly toward the door. With his hand on the knob he turned and glanced keenly at her. He surprised in her face a look of mystery—of seriousness, of sadness—was there anxiety in it, also? And then he saw a certain elusive reminder of her father—and it brought to him with curious force the memory of how she had been brought up, of what must be hers by inheritance and by training—she, the daughter of a great and simple and noble man——
"You'll come again?" she said, and there was the note in her voice that made his nerves grow tense and vibrate.
But he seemed not to have heard her question. Still at the unopened door, he folded his arms upon his chest and said, speaking rapidly yet with the deliberation of one who has thought out his words in advance:
"I don't know what kind of girl you are. I never have known. I've never wanted to know. If you told me you were—what is called good, I'd doubt it. If you told me you weren't, I'd want to kill you and myself. They say there's a fatal woman for every man and a fatal man for every woman. I always laughed at the idea—until you. I don't know what to make of myself."
She suddenly laid her finger on her lips. It irritated him, to discover that, as he talked, speaking the things that came from the very depths of his soul, she had been giving him only part of her attention, had been listening for a step on the stairs. He was hearing the ascending step now. He frowned. "Can't you send him away?" he asked.
"I must," said she in a low tone. "It wouldn't do for him to know you were here. He has strict ideas—and is terribly jealous."
A few seconds of silence, then a knock on the other side of the door.
"Who's there?" she called.
"I'm a little early," came in an agreeable, young man's voice. "Aren't you ready?"
"Not nearly," replied she, in a laughing, innocent voice. "You'll have to go away for half an hour."
"I'll wait out here on the steps."
Her eyes were sparkling. A delicate color had mounted to her skin. Norman, watching her jealously, clinched his strong jaws. She said: "No—you must go clear away. I don't want to feel that I'm being hurried. Don't come back until a quarter past four."
"All right. I'm crazy to see you." This in the voice of a lover. She smiled radiantly at Norman, as if she thought he would share in her happiness at these evidences of her being well loved. The unseen young man said: "Exactly a quarter past. What time does your clock say it is now?"
"A quarter to," replied she.
"That's what my watch says. So there'll be no mistake. For half an hour—good-by!"
"Half an hour!" she called.
She and Norman stood in silence until the footsteps died away. Then she said crossly to Norman: "You ought to have gone before. I don't like to do these things."
"You do them well," said he, with a savage gleam.
She was prompt and sure with his punishment. She said, simply and sweetly: "I'd do anything to keephisgood opinion of me."
Norman felt and looked cowed. "You don't know how it makes me suffer to see you fond of another man," he cried.
She seemed not in the least interested, went to the mirror of the bureau and began to inspect her hair with a view to doing it up. "You can go in five minutes," said she. "By that time he'll be well out of the way. Anyhow, if he saw you leaving the house he'd not know but what you had been to see some one else. He knows you by reputation but not by sight."
Norman went to her, took her by the shoulders gently but strongly. "Look at me," he said.
She looked at him with an expression, or perhaps absence of expression, that was simple listening.
"If you meant awhile ago some such thing as I hinted—I will have nothing to do with it. You must marry me—or it's nothing at all."
Her gaze did not wander, but before his wondering eyes she seemed to fade, fade toward colorlessness insignificance. The light died from her eyes, the flush of health from her white skin, the freshness from her lips, the sparkle and vitality from her hair. A slow, gradual transformation, which he watched with a frightened tightening at the heart.
She said slowly: "You—want—me—to—marry—you?"
"I've always wanted it, though I didn't realize," replied he. "How else could I be sure of you? Besides—" He flushed, added hurriedly, almost in an undertone—"I owe it to you."
She seated herself deliberately.
After he had waited in vain for her to speak, he went on: "If you married me, I know you'd play square. I could trust you absolutely. I don't know—can't find out much about you—but at least I know that."
"But I don't love you," said she.
"You needn't remind me of it," rejoined he curtly.
"I don't think so—so poorly of you as I used to," she went on. "I understand a lot of things better than I did. But I don't love you, and I feel that I never could."
"I'll risk that," said Norman. Through his clinched teeth, "I've got to risk it."
"I'd be marrying you because I don't feel able to—to make my own way."
"That's the reason most girls have for marrying," said he. "Love comes afterward—if it comes. And it's the more likely to come for the girl not having faked the man and herself beforehand."
She glanced at the clock. He frowned. She started up. "Youmustgo," she said.
"What is your answer?"
"Oh, I couldn't decide so quickly. I must think."
"You mean you must see your young man again—see whether there isn't some way of working it out with him."
"That, too," replied she simply. "But—it's nearly four o'clock——"
"I'll come back at seven for my answer."
"No, I'll write you to-night."
"I must know at once. This suspense has got to end. It unfits me for everything."
"I'll—I'll decide—to-night," she said, with a queer catch in her voice. "You'll get the letter in the morning mail."
"Very well." And he gave her his club address.
She opened the door in her impatience to be rid of him. He went with a hasty "Good-by" which she echoed as she closed the door.
When he left the house he saw standing on the curb before it a tall, good-looking young man—with a frank amiable face. He hesitated, glowering at the young man's profile. Then he went his way, suffocating with jealous anger, depressed, despondent, fit for nothing but to drink and to brood in fatuous futility.
Until very recently indeed psychology was not an ology at all but an indefinite something or other "up in the air," the sport of the winds and fogs of transcendental tommy rot. Now, however, science has drawn it down, has fitted it in its proper place as a branch of physiology. And we are beginning to have a clearer understanding of the thoughts and the thought-producing actions of ourselves and our fellow beings. Soon it will be no longer possible for the historian and the novelist, the dramatist, the poet, the painter or sculptor to present in all seriousness as instances of sane human conduct, the aberrations resulting from various forms of disease ranging from indigestion in its mild, temper-breeding forms to acute homicidal or suicidal mania. In that day of greater enlightenment a large body of now much esteemed art will become ridiculous. Practically all the literature of strenuous passion will go by the board or will be relegated to the medical library where it belongs; and it, and the annals of violence found in the daily newspapers of our remote time will be cited as documentary proof of the low economic and hygienic conditions prevailing in that almost barbarous period. For certain it is that the human animal when healthy and well fed is invariably peaceable and kindly and tolerant—up to the limits of selfishness, and even encroaching upon those limits.
Of writing rubbish about love and passion there is no end—and will be no end until the venerable traditional nonsense about those interesting emotions shares the fate that should overtake all the cobwebs of ignorance thickly clogging the windows and walls of the human mind. Of all the fiddle-faddle concerning passion probably none is more shudderingly admired than the notion that one possessed of an overwhelming desire for another longs to destroy that other. It is true there is a form of murderous mania that involves practically all the emotions, including of course the passions—which are as readily subject to derangement as any other part of the human organism. But passion in itself—even when it is so powerful that it dominates the whole life, as in the case of Frederick Norman—passion in itself is not a form of mental derangement in the medical sense. And it does not produce acute selfishness, paranoiac egotism, but a generous and beautiful kind of unselfishness. Not from the first moment of Fred Norman's possession did he wish to injure or in any way to make unhappy the girl he loved. He longed to be happy with her, to have her happy with and through him. He represented his plotting to himself as a plan to make her happier than she ever had been; as for ultimate consequences, he refused to consider them. The most hardened rake, when passion possesses him, wishes all happiness to the woman of his pursuit. Indifference, coldness—the natural hard-heartedness of the normal man—returns only when the inspiration and elevation of passion disappear in satiety. The man or the woman who continues to inspire passion continues to inspire tenderness and considerateness.
So when Norman left Dorothy that Sunday afternoon, he, being a normal if sore beset human being, was soon in the throes of an agonized remorse. There may have been some hypocrisy in it, some struggling to cover up the baser elements in his infatuation for her. What human emotion of upward tendency has not at least a little of the varnish of hypocrisy on certain less presentable spots in it? But in the main it was a creditable, a manly remorse, and not altogether the writhings of jealousy and jealous fear of losing her.
He saw clearly that she was telling the truth, and telling it too gently, when she said he was responsible for her having standards of living which she could not unaided hope to attain. It is a dreadful thing to interfere in the destiny of a fellow being. We do it all the time; we do it lightly. Nevertheless, it is a dreadful thing—not one that ought not to be done, but one that ought to be done only under imperative compulsion, and then with every precaution. He had interfered in Dorothy Hallowell's destiny. He had lifted her out of the dim obscure niche where she was ensconced in comparative contentment. He had lifted her up where she had seen and felt the pleasures of a life of luxury.
"But for me," he said to himself, "she would now be marrying this poor young lawyer, or some chap of the same sort, and would be looking forward to a life of happiness in a little flat or suburban cottage."
If she should refuse his offer—what then? Clearly he ought to do his best to help her to happiness with the other man. He smiled cynically at the moral height to which his logic thus pointed the way. Nevertheless, he did not turn away but surveyed it—and there formed in his mind an impulse to make an effort to attempt that height, if Fate should rule against him with her. "If I were a really decent man," thought he, "I'd sit down now and write her that I would not marry her but would give her young man a friendly hand in the law if she wished to marry him." But he knew that such utter generosity was far beyond him. "Only a hero could do it," said he; he added with what a sentimentalist might have called a return of his normal cynicism, "only a hero who really in the bottom of his heart didn't especially want the girl." And a candid person of experience might possibly admit that there was more truth than cynicism in his look askance at the grand army of martyrs of renunciation, most of whom have simply given up something they didn't really want.
"If she accepts me, I'll make it impossible for her not to be happy," he said to himself, in all the fine unselfishness of passion—not divine unselfishness but human—not the kind we read about and pretend to have—and get a savage attack of bruised vanity if we are accused of not having it—no, but just the kind we have and show in our daily lives—the unselfishness of longing to make happy those whom it would make us happier to see happy. "She may think she cares for this young clerk—" so ran his thoughts—"but she doesn't know her own mind. When she is mine, I'll take her in hand as a gardener does a delicate rare flower—and, by Heaven, how I shall make her blossom and bloom!"
It would hardly be possible for a human being to pass a stormier night than was that night of his. Alternations between hope and despair—fantastic pictures of future with and without her, wild pleadings with her—those delirious transports to which our imaginations give way if we happen to be blessed and cursed with imaginations—in the security of the darkness and aloneness of night and bed. And through it all he was tormented body and soul by her loveliness—her hair, her skin, her eyes, the shy, slender graces of her form—He tossed about until his bed was so wildly disheveled that he had to rise and remake it.
When day came and the first mail, there was her letter on the salver of the boy entering the room. He reached for it with eager, trembling arm, drew back. "Put it on the table," he said.
The boy left. He was alone. Leaning upon his elbow in the bed he stared at the letter with hollow, terrified eyes. It contained his destiny. If she accepted, he would go up, for his soul sickness would be cured. If she refused, he would cease to struggle. He rose, took from a locked drawer a bottle of rye whisky. He poured a tall glass—the kind called a bar glass—half full, drank it straight down without a pause or a quiver. The shock brought him up standing. He looked and acted like his former self as he went to the table, took the letter, opened it, and read:
"I am willing to marry you, if you really want me. I am so tired ofstruggling, and I don't see anything but dark ahead.—D. H."
Norman struggled over to the bed, threw himself down, flat upon his back, arms and legs extended wide and whole body relaxed. He felt the blood whirl up into his brain like the great red and black tongues of flame and smoke in a conflagration, and then he slept soundly until nearly one o'clock.
To an outsider there would have been a world of homely commonplace pathos in that little letter of the girl's if read aright, that is to say, if read with what was between the lines supplied. It is impossible to live in cities any length of time and with any sort of eyes without learning the bitter unromantic truths about poverty—city poverty. In quiet, desolate places one may be poor, very poor, without much conscious suffering. There are no teasing contrasts, no torturing temptations. But in a city, if one knows anything at all of the possibilities of civilized life, of the joys and comforts of good food, clothing, and shelter, of theater and concert and excursion, of entertaining and being entertained, poverty becomes a hell. In the country, in the quiet towns, the innocent people wonder at the greediness of the more comfortable kinds of city people, at their love of money, their incessant dwelling upon it, their reverence for those who have it, their panic-like flight from those who have it not. They wonder how folk, apparently human, can be so inhuman. Let them be careful how they judge. If you discover any human being anywhere acting as you think a human being should not, investigate all the circumstances, look thoroughly into all the causes of his or her conduct, before you condemn him or her as inhuman, unworthy of your kinship and your sympathy.
In her brief letter the girl showed that, young though she was and not widely experienced in life, she yet had seen the horrors of city poverty, how it poisons and kills all the fine emotions. She had seen many a loving young couple start out confidently, with a few hundred dollars of debt for furniture—had seen the love fade and wither, shrivel, die—had seen appear peevishness and hatred and unfaithfulness and all the huge, foul weeds that choke the flowers of married life. She knew what her lover's salary would buy—and what it would not buy—for two. She could imagine their fate if there should be three or more. She showed frankly her selfishness of renunciation. But there could be read between the lines—concealed instead of vaunted—perhaps unsuspected—her unselfishness of renunciation for the sake of her lover and for the sake of the child or the children that might be. In our love of moral sham and glitter, we overlook the real beauties of human morality; we even are so dim or vulgar sighted that we do not see them when they are shown to us.
As Norman awakened, he reached for the telephone, said to the boy in charge of the club exchange: "Look in the book, find the number of a lawyer named Branscombe, and connect me with his office." After some confusion and delay he got the right office, but Dorothy was out at lunch. He left a message that she was to call him up at the club as soon as she came in. He was shaving when the bell rang.
He was at the receiver in a bound. "Is it you?" he said.
"Yes," came in her quiet, small voice.
"Will you resign down there to-day? Will you marry me this afternoon?"
A brief silence, then—"Yes."
Thus it came about that they met at the City Hall license bureau, got their license, and half an hour later were married at the house of a minister in East Thirty-third Street, within a block of the Subway station. He was feverish, gay, looked years younger than his thirty-seven. She was quiet, dim, passive, neither grave nor gay, but going through her part without hesitation, with much the same patient, plodding expression she habitually bore as she sat working at her machine—as if she did not quite understand, but was doing her best and hoped to get through not so badly.
"I've had nothing to eat," said he as they came out of the parsonage.
"Nor I," said she.
"We'll go to Delmonico's," said he, and hailed a passing taxi.
On the way, he sitting in one corner explained to her, shrunk into the other corner: "I can confess now that I married you under false pretenses. I am not prosperous, as I used to be. To be brief and plain, I'm down and out, professionally."
She did not move. Apparently she did not change expression. Yet he, speaking half banteringly, felt some frightful catastrophe within her. "You are—poor?" she said in her usual quiet way.
"Weare poor," corrected he. "I have at present only a thousand dollars a month—a little more, but not enough to talk about."
She did not move or change expression. Yet he felt that her heart, her blood were going on again.
"Are you—angry?" he asked.
"A thousand dollars a month seems an awful lot of money to me," she said.
"It's nothing—nothing to what we'll soon have. Trust me." And back into his eyes flashed their former look. "I've been sick. I'm well again. I shall get what I want. If you want anything, you've only to ask for it. I'll get it. I know how. . . . I don't prey, myself—I've no fancy for the brutal sports. But I teach lions how to prey, and I make them pay for the lessons." He laughed with an effervescing of young vitality and self-confidence that made him look handsome and powerful. "In the future they'll have to pay still higher prices."
She was looking at him with weary, wondering, pathetic eyes that gazed from the pallor of her dead-white face mysteriously.
"What are you thinking?" he asked.
"I was listening," replied she.
"Doesn't it make you happy—what you are going to have?"
"No," replied she. "But it makes me content."
With eyes suddenly suffused, he took her hand—so gently. "Dorothy," he said, "you will try to love me?"
"I'll try," said she. "You'll be kind to me?"
"I couldn't be anything else," he cried. And in a gust of passion he caught her to his breast and kissed her triumphantly. "I love you—and you're mine—mine!"
She released herself with the faint insistent push that seemed weak, but always accomplished its purpose. Her lip was trembling. "You said you'd be kind," she murmured.
He gazed at her with a baffled expression. "Oh—I understand," he said. "And I shall be kind. But I must teach you to love me."
Her trembling lip steadied. "You must be careful or you may teach me to hate you," said she.
He studied her in a puzzled way, laughed. "What a mystery you are!" he cried with raillery. "Are you child or are you woman? No matter. We shall be happy."
The taxicab was swinging to the curb. In the restaurant he ordered an enormous meal. And he ate enormously, and drank in due proportion. She ate and drank a good deal herself—a good deal for her. And the results were soon apparent in a return of the spirits that are normal to twenty-one years, regardless of what may be lurking in the heart, in a dark corner, to come forth and torment when there is nothing to distract the attention.
"We shall have to live quietly for a while," said he. "Of course you must have clothes-at once. I'll take you shopping to-morrow." He laughed grimly. "Just at present we can get only what we pay cash for. Still, you won't need much. Later on I'll take you over to Paris. Does that attract you?"
Her eyes shone. "How soon?" she asked.
"I can tell you in a week or ten days." He became abstracted for a moment. "I can't understand how I let them get me down so easily—that is, I can't understand it now. I suppose it's just the difference between being weak with illness and strong with health." His eyes concentrated on her. "Is it really you?" he cried gaily. "And are you really mine? No wonder I feel strong! It was always that way with me. I never could leave a thing until I had conquered it."
She gave him a sweet smile. "I'm not worth all the trouble you seem to have taken about me," said she.
He laughed; for he knew the intense vanity so pleasantly hidden beneath her shy and modest exterior. "On the contrary," said he good-humoredly, "you in your heart think yourself worth any amount of trouble. It's a habit we men have got you women into. And you—One of the many things that fascinate me in you is your supreme self-control. If the king were to come down from his throne and fall at your feet, you'd take it as a matter of course."
She gazed away dreamily. And he understood that her indifference to matters of rank and wealth and power was not wholly vanity but was, in part at least, due to a feeling that love was the only essential. Nor did he wonder how she was reconciling this belief of high and pure sentiment with what she was doing in marrying him. He knew that human beings are not consistent, cannot be so in a universe that compels them to face directly opposite conditions often in the same moment. But just as all lines are parallel in infinity, so all actions are profoundly consistent when referred to the infinitely broad standard of the necessity that every living thing shall look primarily to its own well being. Disobedience to this fundamental carries with it inevitable punishment of disintegration and death; and those catastrophes are serious matters when one has but the single chance at life, that will be repeated never again in all the eternities.
After their late lunch or early dinner, they drove to her lodgings. He went up with her and helped her to pack—not a long process, as she had few belongings. He noted that the stockings and underclothes she took from the bureau drawers were in anything but good condition, that the half dozen dresses she took from the closet and folded on the couch were about done for. Presently she said, cheerfully and with no trace of false shame:
"You see, I'm pretty nearly in rags."
"Oh, that's soon arranged," replied he. "Why bother to take these things? Why not give them to the maid?"
She debated with herself. "I think you're right," she decided. "Yes, I'll give them to Jennie."
"The underclothes, too," he urged. "And the hats."
It ended in her having left barely enough loosely to fill the bottom of a small trunk with two trays.
They drove to the Knickerbocker Hotel, and he took a small suite, one of the smallest and least luxurious in the house, for with all his desire to make her feel the contrast of her change of circumstances sharply, he could not forget how limited his income was, and how unwise it would be to have to move in a few days to humbler quarters. He hoped that the rooms, englamoured by the hotel's general air of costly luxury, would sufficiently impress her. And while she gave no strong indication but accepted everything in her wonted quiet, passive manner, he was shrewd enough to see that she was content. "To-morrow," he said to himself, "after she has done some shopping, the last regret will leave her, and her memory of that clerk will begin to fade fast. I'll give her too much else to think about."
The following morning, when they faced each other at breakfast in their sitting room, he glanced at her from time to time in wonder and terror. She looked not merely insignificant, but positively homely. Her skin had a sickly pallor; her hair seemed to be of many different and disagreeable shades of uninteresting dead yellow. Her eyes suggested faded blue china dishes, with colorless lashes and reddened edges of the lids. Her lips had lost their rosy freshness, her teeth their sparkling whiteness.
His heavy heart seemed to be resting nauseously upon the pit of his stomach. Was his infatuation sheer delusion, with no basis of charm in her at all? Was she, indeed, nothing but this unattractive, faded little commonplaceness?—a poor specimen of an inferior order of working girl? What an awakening! And she was hiswife!—was his companion for the yet more brilliant career he had resolved and was planning! He must introduce her everywhere, must see the not to be concealed amazement in the faces of his acquaintances, must feel the cruel covert laughter and jeering at his weak folly! Was there ever in history or romance a parallel to such fatuity as his? Why, people would be right in thinking him a sham, a mere bluffer at the high and strong qualities he was reputed to have.
Had Norman been, in fact, the man of ice and iron the compulsions of a career under the social system made him seem, the homely girl opposite him that morning would speedily have had something to think about other than her unhappiness of the woman who has given her person to one man and her heart to another. Instead, the few words he addressed to her were all gentleness and forbearance. Stronger than his chagrin was his pity for her—the poor, unconscious victim of his mad hallucination. If she thought about the matter at all, she assumed that he was still the slave of her charms—for, the florid enthusiasm of man's passion inevitably deludes the woman into fancying it objective instead of wholly subjective; and, only the rare very wise woman, after much experience, learns to be suspicious of the validity of her own charms and to concentrate upon keeping up the man's delusions.
At last he rose and kissed her on the brow and let his hand rest gently on her shoulder—what a difference between those caresses and the caresses that had made her beg him to be "kind" to her! Said he:
"Do you mind if I leave you alone for a while? I ought to go to the club and have the rest of my things packed and sent. I'll not be gone long—about an hour."
"Very well," said she lifelessly.
"I'll telephone my office that I'll not be down to-day."
With an effort she said, "There's no reason for doing that. I don't want to interfere with your business."
"I'm neglecting nothing. And that shopping must be done."
She made no reply, but went to the window, and from the height looked down and out upon the mighty spread of the city. He observed her a moment with a dazed pitying expression, took his hat and departed.
It was nearly two hours before he got together sufficient courage to return. He had been hoping—had been saying to himself with vigorous effort at confidence—that he had simply seen one more of the many transformations, each of which seemed to present her as a wholly different personality. When he should see her again, she would have wiped out the personality that had shocked and saddened him, would appear as some new variety of enchantress, perhaps even more potent over his senses than ever before. But a glance as he entered demolished that hope. She was no different than when he left. Evidently she had been crying, and spasms of that sort always accentuate every unloveliness. He did not try to nerve himself to kiss her, but said:
"It'll not take you long to get ready?"
She moved to rise from her languid rest upon the sofa. She sank back. "Perhaps we'd better not go to-day," suggested she.
"Don't you feel well?" he asked, and his tone was more sympathetic than it would have been had his sympathy been genuine.
"Not very," replied she, with a faint deprecating smile. "And not very—not very——"
"Not very what?" he said, in a tone of encouragement.
"Not very happy," she confessed. "I'm afraid I've made a—a dreadful mistake."