CHAPTER TWENTY-NINEAVALANCHE
“When I was a child,” he said, “I lived in an orphan asylum. It stood on a hill, and down below there were a lot of iron foundries. The air was always full of smoke. It came up sometimes in clouds—in clouds—in black clouds that even covered up the sun.”
“Oh!” cried Stella, one hand pressed against her cheek. In the presence of his great serenity her agitation seemed immense, unendurable.
“I never knew who my people were. From what I could make out, and it was very little, I guess I must have been picked up somewhere.” He smiled dreamily. “Yes, I guess that must have been it. One day I decided to run away. It was a great many miles to New York, and I walked. Later on I was earning three meals a day making artificial flowers in a garret in Bleeker street. I can see it now—most of the plaster fallen off the walls—dormers sticking out through the roof—elevated trains going by all day right beside the windows.... We made everything,” he said, his tone tender and a little caressing, “from single and double roses to lilies-of-the-valley. But I liked to make violets best, and they let me do them most of the time, because I could turn out so many in a day.”
“Violets....” Stella murmured, and saw again a florist’s boy standing at her door with a small square box and a note.
“Later on, I became a model in a class of sculptors. Then for many years I did whatever work I could get hold of andmanaged to keep from starving. You see how beautiful it all is? But to get to the shoes....”
He paused just a moment, a faint smile signifying what pure and calm delight this flow of reminiscence brought to his soul. Then he went on speaking.
“How it happened was like this: A long, long time later, I worked through a part of one winter in a popular-priced upstairs clothing concern, posing in the window as a wax figure wearing the latest thing in business suits. All I had to do,” he explained with another of his gentle, bubbling laughs, “was put on a heavy makeup, that I learned how to do once from an actor I roomed with. Then I dressed up and walked out into the window. I would strike a pose and hold it fifteen or twenty minutes, standing without moving. When I broke the pose, half the people out in the street would be standing there with their mouths open.” He smiled, a look of great happiness and light in his wasted face. “They paid me ten dollars a week. I lived on stew and doughnuts, and slept a part of the time in a sort of dormitory where the beds were twenty-five cents a night, with special inducements if taken by the week.”
The man seemed all aglow and under the sway of eternal forces. Indeed, as the excitement of narrative grew upon him he began to show even a tiny flush across his sunken cheeks, which had become at length so grey and sere. His eyes were bright and a little wild, as with fever.
King seemed eager that she should know what his life had been—just as at first he had bowed to her silent mandate that only what was fine and romantic in it need matter. He kept exclaiming: “Isn’t it beautiful?” And she could do nothing but sit there and listen, while, on his serene and breathless heights he tore the veil from a heart which had so long been shut away in a realm of glamorous mystery.
“It lasted nearly all one winter,” he went on. “Then Ilost this good place because the daughter of the managing director got crazy about me. She was a pretty little doll,” he laughed, musingly, “and I guess I might have done a whole lot worse than marry her. But you see I was nobody, with a salary of only ten dollars a week, and anyhow, I wasn’t in love with the girl. But she made such a commotion that they decided it would be good thing to get me out of the way.”
His look was eager, yet always serene, and he kept rocking gently. To Stella there seemed in him a horrid new fascination as he hurled forth at her, though so softly and from so cloud-kissed an elevation, this startling avalanche of words. She listened to him with hot flushes. And she could not bid him stop till he had poured out all his heart to her; she could not deprive herself of a single bitter drop.
“After that,” he continued, “I decided to go to Rochester, because I’d found some items in the help wanted columns that looked pretty good. Moving,” he smiled in lambent appreciation, “was no great matter. I didn’t even have a trunk. I just put my things in a paper suitcase and got on the train. In Rochester I found work in a shoe store. It didn’t take me long to catch on, and it turned out to be a very good thing.”
Indeed, it turned out, in quite short order, that fitting shoes was King’s genuine calling. Business actually increased—especially on the feminine side of the establishment. “Ladies came,” he said, with an effect of quiet drollness, “who needed shoes no more than they needed elephants.” There seemed to be a peculiar and overwhelming thrill about the mere way he knelt before them in his superbly fitting clothes. But the odd part of it all was that this enormous fascination was just as natural and spontaneous in him as eating or walking. He became, in a short time, a kind of shoe-fitting matinée idol.
Stella made a vague gesture, but it did not amount to an interruption. She had merely come to a last little climax in her immense disillusion. Almost without realizing it during the past months, with everything else torn asunder in her life, Stella had faintly clung to the thought that there wasan aura of martyrdom playing out from her position. Other women before her had married men who, like Ferdinand, had fallen victims to drug. A man might be very brilliant, even an actual prince, for that matter, and still destroy himself with opium. But now the last ounce of sentimental comfort was drowned in her soul by this sudden outburst of confession—which yet was no confession surely, so far as the radiant being before her was concerned. (“It’s all beautiful—isn’t it!” he murmured.) And she saw with an eye of entire disenchantment at last that the man she had married had once been a wax figure in a clothing window, and then a shoe clerk. How could she think of herself as a martyr after that?
“I liked to hang around hotel lobbies and bars,” he said. “I would drift around with swells and imagine I was one of them. In the back of my head somewhere I was always figuring—I even had some sort of idea that I might meet somebody some day who would give me a boost.”
He dressed like a dandy and lived in a hall bedroom. He wore a pearl stick pin and gaiters and believed in “hunches” and went on fitting shoes. Naturally, all this time, he admitted, with one of his soft little laughs, there were affairs of the heart. He withheld nothing, but poured it out upon Stella in a warm, confounding torrent. Of course a man so magnetic could not very well escape the toils into which his sheer perfection of face and form attracted poor dazzled idolaters.
“I was always getting mash notes,” he said, “from women I didn’t know from Eve. They were sometimes on monogram stationery, and scented.... Women were always wanting to meet me, and inviting me to tea, and begging me to send them my photograph. I used to get so tired of it sometimes,” he sighed, yet quite happily. “You can’t imagine how tired I’d get. I used to want something else, but I never seemed to know just what....”
Serenely and without a blush, in this curious exaltation wherein all was tuned to the “master key,” King told his story to the girl he had finally married. Stella, breathingrapidly, her hands clasping and unclasping in her lap, saw again with singular vividness her husband coming out of the hut where Cha-cha-kamui’s Small Wife lived.
“I was forever laying plans,” he went on. “I kept planning to do all sorts of things, and just went on selling shoes. I was always figuring. I wanted to be rich and travel off over the world. I used to collect travel guides and vacation pamphlets wherever I could find them, in railroads and steamship offices and hotels. Sometimes you’d be surprised what beauties I’d pick up in the way of travel booklets! I would take them home and go through them, figuring and planning. I got after a while so I knew all the favourite tourist stopping places about as well as though I’d seen them.” He smiled with consummate satisfaction.
Stella caught her breath a little, and gazed at her husband with eyes staring and amazed. “But—” she faltered, out of her morass of disillusion. “But—Egypt—Monte Carlo—Waikiki...?”
King laughed gently. “Figures of speech, you might call them, I guess.”
“But Ferd—”
“I used to plan and figure about it all so much, sometimes I wasn’t quite sure myself whether I’d really seen places or only imagined I had. It got to be that way. But,” he went on with a new touch of eagerness in his voice, “there was one genuine little joy ride. One year a Rochester newspaper held a contest to decide who was the most popular clerk, and I won it! Just imagine that! All the women voted for me, and I got a free trip through Yellowstone Park and on out to the Coast. I always had that to build on. The rest was what I hoped I’d do some day....”
“But,” she murmured, “you were picked up at sea—Captain Utterbourne....”
“Oh, yes,” King smiled. “I was just starting out to see some sights then. Somehow or other I’d managed to save uptwo or three hundred dollars. I don’t know how I ever managed to, with all the demands....” It was dressing like a prince, he had in mind, and the financing of his endless small flirtations. “I booked a passage on a rummy old freight steamer that carried a few passengers. I happened to hear about it. The steamer was going to some place in Europe—some little port I’d never even heard of. But it was cheap, and I thought I’d start out and see what happened. I thought it would be a grand thing to stop selling shoes and begin living like a real millionaire. But—I don’t know. I never quite figured out how it was. Almost as soon as I’d started I wished I hadn’t. I guess maybe it was a little too late in life to try to change all my habits, and I’d done so much planning and travelled around such a lot in my mind that now I was really starting out to do it, it seemed a little stale and tame. I really wished I hadn’t started. But by that time it was too late to turn back.
“The boat wasn’t seaworthy, and somewhere out in the ocean we broke down. That’s fate, I told myself. I guess we would have gone to the bottom if Captain Utterbourne hadn’t happened to come along in hisStar of Troy.”
“And then....” Stella just murmured. She saw how the astonishing tale was approaching, pitilessly and inevitably, the epoch wherein she herself began to figure; she felt the imminence, at last, of her own phase, and could only sit there and listen, while the words fell about her.
And then—yes, then there had been Utterbourne, holding up before him a glass in which stretched a perspective of strange new combinations.
“I’d begun to feel so uncertain,” he said, with the first shade of weariness in his voice. “When I got out at sea, on my way to some little port, I began to wonder if what I really wanted wasn’t to settle down somewhere and get a few years of domestic life before my time came to die. I guess something of that sort must have been what I wanted all along, even if I never seemed to know what it was.... I thought I’d like to go back to selling shoes again, maybe, and try toget married, if I could, to somebody who’d know how to make a snug little home. I went on planning and planning—always planning.” A faint note of bitterness seemed creeping in. “When I came home from work, I figured, there would be a smiling little wife waiting to welcome me with a kiss and supper. I even figured on a Morris chair and slippers to put on in the evening, instead of—well, I’ve told you the sort of life I’d always been used to.... And I could still go on reading guide books and illustrated pamphlets. But of course,” he ended with a sigh which grew a little sombre before he relinquished it, “I couldn’t very well turn down an offer like Captain Utterbourne’s....”
“Go on,” the girl said. She had heard so much. She knew she could hear what remained without flinching.
“You can imagine the rest,” he said, his tone growing restless. “Most of it you know already.” He told her, not without an increasing though always muffled, groping bitterness, as the exaltation gradually failed, how his romantic soul revived. Caesar was himself again. But that queer little waif of simplicity, almost like homesickness, in his heart, didn’t quite die of despair, even now. “It was about then,” he ended, “that I met you, Stella.”
She had uttered her cry for romance just as Fairy Fate happened to be passing by her door. Fairy Fate decided to have a little fun. Stella wanted a prince. Very well, then, she should have a prince. However, it was really to the waif in his heart that she belonged, though she did not know this at first, and afterward would not have it so, but must ever strive to persuade herself that he had fallen in love with her as he might fall in love with Irmengarde....
“What a pity it all is,” she thought, as his feverish tongue at length lapsed speechless. There was a long silence, and she thought: “How fooled we both were!”
He sat before her, relaxing now, and trembling. His look of ecstasy darkened and glimmered out, while his eyes tookon their old tortured stare. When he spoke, the softness and breathless simplicity were gone from his voice, which sounded muddy and harsh. He beat with one fist against his forehead.
“I’ve been a fool—all my life, such a fool!” he muttered.
The little hectic colour died from his cheeks, and in his eyes she saw stealing again the awful look of torturing hunger for opium, which no power could stifle any more.
But she spoke to him very gently. “I understand now, Ferd. I understand it all.”
And she thought: “It was my price.”
Wearily and mechanically, while he slunk away to the cot where his smoking materials always were, Stella’s hands took up the work which had fallen into her lap. She sat sewing, just as she had sat beside the hearth the day he had begged her not to stop. “You don’t know how charming it is to see a woman sitting before the fire, busy with needlework,” he had said. There was a waif in his heart and he had married her.
But the tears were spent, and there was nothing left now but time and silence.