Yet he was not conscious of any feeling of love. She was still an unknown and uncharted land to him, to which at times the instinct of self-preservation blindly inclined him. Nor could he fathom the feeling that had sent her to his assistance. He was grateful, to the point that he would not for the world have left a bruising memory on her young life, and yet, at times, at the thought that in her silent watching, her unquestioning devotion, there lay a deep unfaltering determination to turn him aside from his fixed purpose, he felt a fierce revolt, an angry antagonism at her growing ascendency. This was the situation on the night when, mercifully confused in memory and perceptions, he had stumbled back into his studio, mocking at destiny, and found her waiting.
In his present numbed sense of outlines and of jumbled conceptions Dangerfield had obeyed a sullen instinct of revolt when he had drawn Inga from the studio to plunge again into the heavy slumber of the city. He had a confused idea that, in this groping flight through deserted midnight regions, he would find some way to discourage her, to shake off this uncomplaining obstacle to his liberty of decision. The long flights of stone steps down which they groped their way, put forth hollow, echoing protests which mounted behind them as they sank deeper into the cavernous descent, until they emerged into the arcade, wan and still with its faint, watery glass sides and dipping vines, and ahead, Broadway yawning at the entrance.
Dangerfield strode on, seeing neither to the right nor to the left, and, following the whim of the moment, turned westward toward the river. A late car roared down the long vista and fled, retreating in softening rumbles. The street was empty and the acute sound of their steps struck in fantastic distortion against the city of silence. A policeman from the shadow of a doorway studied them with suspicion. Above them, mysterious leviathans—swollen gas-towers—spread black bulks against the sprinkled night. He stopped and turned on her, seeing her white face dimly in the flickering street.
“So you are following me?” he said angrily.
“Please.”
She moved a little closer, her hands clasped and at her throat, in her voice that low almost guttural note of soothingappeal which she knew had the charm of quieting him. He stared at her blankly, confusing her with other voices and other memories, and, in the end, with a nervous shake of his head, strode away, apparently oblivious of her presence.
The tenements closed in over them, putting forth their heavy, crowded smells. A random fruit-stand glowed at their sides, its drowsy guardian snoring behind glass partitions; beyond him, a senseless body, wrapped in rags huddled in the warmth of a “family entrance”; shouts, curses, laughter rolled out from a blinded back parlor, and, all at once, a stream of yellow shot across the oozing black of the street. They stopped abruptly; from the doorway an old man reeled forth, and by his side, guiding his hand, a child—an unearthly child with an aureole of golden hair. He came opposite, lurched almost on them, touched them with a groping hand and passed, grumbling. He was blind. Dangerfield began to laugh with that short, blood-freezing laughter of his, which was the cry of all the bitterness within his soul. She shuddered and momentarily clung to his arm, turning to watch the child and the drunkard fading into the gloom.
“Afraid?” he said triumphantly.
“No, no—memories,” she said involuntarily.
“You?” he said, staring at her.
She nodded, her grip on his arm tightening.
“I remember,” she said, in a whisper.
“She remembers,” he repeated to himself, incapable of ordering his ideas, vastly impressed by an emotion he could not have defined, for he added, “She, too—leading me.” And as though the figure of the child had become merged into the hundred and one shifting memories which walked, dissolved, and returned to his side, he stalked on, his hand on the girl’s shoulder, heavy with his weight. Everything became confused in his mind, Paris,Rome, Florence, London, New York, the crowded boulevards, the Thames Embankment, and the outer fortifications. The blurred uprise of the gas-works settled into the age-worn outline of the Forum, and the next moment, with the wet breath of the river on his face and the vigilant lights of the Palisades bright in the air, he was skirting the Arno, with Fiesole mingling with the stars.
The cold touch of the river wind momentarily revived him. Slowly the Arno faded from his vision. He stood, in puzzled, dawning comprehension, on the long water-front, with its sleeping docks and nodding mastheads. Beyond lay the tragic depths of the river, rolling away like the tears of multitudes, luminous insects crawling back and forth. At his feet, straggling trucks were rumbling heavily; a few all-night cafés, far-spaced, streaked the broad avenue with their gleaming fingers. He shrank back into the city, into the phantasmagoria which closed over his eyes and roared on his senses, back on Broadway once more, with its occasional taxi, bright with late revelers.
At Sixty-first Street he halted before the revolving facets of the entrance to Costello’s. The footman without saluted him and called him by name. A few parties, with sudden bursts of white satin and colored brilliance, were leaving the noisy salons. Others returning from earlier rounds of gaiety were pressing through, like fluttering, many-tinted butterflies.
“I’m going in,” he said sullenly.
“If you want to,” she answered.
He had expected resistance. Compliance irritated him. The next moment, they were in the anteroom, dazed by their abrupt transition from the bleakness of the slums into this fragrant warm nest of indolence and luxury, aware of perfumed currents, glowing bodies, and the seduction of rioting rhythms. They mounted in an elevatorto a privileged room, where all sensations seemed mingled in the confusion of the awakening senses, where, for a moment, she was uncomfortably conscious of the dark, incongruous blot her sober attire made against the swarming flood of color. A waiter, unimpressed, was preparing a hostile answer when Costello himself came up with hand outstretched at the sight of Dangerfield. He turned to the girl, greeting her cordially.
“Glad to see you here again; haven’t seen you for a long time.”
“A table, Costello.”
“Get you one right away, Mr. Garford.”
At his magic touch, they found themselves advantageously placed by the open floor where the dancers crowded and swept against them. Dangerfield ordered a bottle of champagne and turned to her.
“Funny mistake Costello made.”
“What?”
“Acted as though he knew you.”
“Yes; I used to come here—it amused me occasionally.”
“You, Inga?”
“Why not?” she said, opening her eyes.
“After all, why not? Queer though,” he said stupidly but he continued to stare at her, as though this were a manifestation stranger than the riot of cities and visions through which he had come.
She did not refuse the glass of champagne he poured her, but, after raising it to her lips, put it down and did not touch it again. Among this incredible crowd made up of the extremes of society—women of the world seeking refuge from boredom, and courtesans, giving themselves the dignity and manners which, in their covetous ignorance, they associated with conventional society, there were many who knew Dangerfield, who stared in impudentamazement or discussed him in whispers, with sidelong glances. A number of men came up and greeted him boisterously.
“Want to dance with them?” he asked, nodding to her.
She shook her head.
“Not to-night.”
The spectacle began to bore him. He complained of the champagne and changed his order. She gave no word of suggestion, watching him with occasional stolen glances, wondering at his control. Her elbows on the table, her little curved chin on the backs of her hands, rather Egyptian in the immobility of her pose and the baffling quality of her expression, she followed the dance without distinguishing the dancers, quite unconscious of the curiosity she awoke, serious and on her guard. When friends of his sought her as a partner or tried to engage her in conversation, she answered in a few quiet words without looking at them. They soon understood from a glance at her companion what her rôle must be, and importuned her no further.
When she least expected it, Dangerfield rose impatiently and departed.
“How futile that all is!” he said angrily, when they were again on the sidewalk. “Think they’re having a good time—bah!” He swayed for the first time and caught her shoulder, drawing his fingers tightly over his temples. “My brain is rocking,” he said.
“The air will do you good. Walk a little.”
He made an effort, took a long breath, and opened his eyes.
“You still here?” he said, frowning.
She nodded.
“Why do you follow me like this?” he said peevishly.
“Because I care what happens to you.”
“That is ridiculous!” he said loudly.
He stared a moment at her with his wild-animal stare, and, all at once, as though he had found a way to get rid of her, started down Eighth Avenue. They arrived at Columbus Circle with the first muddied grays of the dawn creeping in above the whitening electric signs, then passed under the elevated as a train shrieked and roared above them in its burning flight. A touring car went whirring past them, defiant of speed-laws, skidded dangerously, righting itself, and disappeared.
Scavengers were already turning over the refuse in waiting ash-cans, as they struck into a side street and stopped before an iron grill under the colored electric sign, “Mantell’s.” A little man with ratty eyes and black wisps of hair streaking the bald dome of his head, shuffled to the gate and squinted at them cautiously before slipping the chain.
The low rooms were swept with drifting gray-blue smoke clouds, upholstered benches were against the walls, where oldish women, worn with the fatigue of the night, were smiling their red smiles at fatuous youngsters. Three or four foreign-looking groups, swarthy men with enormous women, were in corners placidly engaged in their own affairs as though this were the most respectable of family resorts. A mechanical piano in a further room drummed out hideous dance-music to swirling groups in frank abandon. Dangerfield was no longer conscious of anything but an angry determination to revolt, to be free of all encumbrance. It seemed to his fuddled imagination that it was no longer Inga at his side but something strangely akin to his conscience, defiantly pursuing him out of the past of his youth and illusions, malignantly and maliciously clinging to him. Somehow, somewhere, he must rid himself of this impossible burden, crush it down, and cast it aside.
The more Inga continued silent and without remonstrance, the wilder his resentment mounted. He continued to drink of the poisonous rank beverages served at extortionate prices. Many stared at them and discussed them openly, but no interference was offered. There was something so combustible and wild in his attitude, that, there, at least no one was under illusions as to the danger. In half an hour the spirit of restlessness in him drove him out into the streets again. He was so befuddled now, that he could not remember her name, calling her Pepita, imagining that she was the little Spanish model of the Latin Quarter who had tried to kill herself.
All at once a horror of the city, of its sham brilliance paling against the graying sky, of its oppressive stone prisons, possessed him with a longing for flight. He strode down into the subway and took a West Farms express. In the car which they entered a score of persons were wearily grouped, half of them asleep, a few heavy-eyed laborers, two men in evening dress, a girl with a heavy coat buttoned over a ball dress, arms folded, and gazing stolidly ahead. Dangerfield seated himself in a corner, nodded, and went to sleep. When they reached the end of the line Inga awoke him with the help of the guard, and asked him what he wanted to do.
He got up suddenly and walked down the long steps to the street. They were in the open spaces of the upper city; a few milk-wagons were passing at rare intervals, about them was the feeling of the rediscovered earth in long, empty, grass-grown lots. He had not spoken a word. Suddenly he stopped and turned, with a new menace in his voice.
“Well—had enough?”
“I’m not tired,” she said, shaking her head and meeting his look steadily.
“We’ll see,” he said, and started off so furiously that, for a time, she was put to it to keep up with him. At theend, from the need of taking breath himself, he stopped and wheeled on her.
“What—you’re still here!”
“Yes.”
She forced a smile, and this smile completed his exasperation.
“Why won’t you let me go?” he cried, in an outburst of rage. “You let me go, do you hear? Dogging and sneaking about me! What right you got—what business is it what I do! No one shall stop me—no one, do you hear?” He advanced threateningly on her. “Had enough of interference—d’you understand? You let me go now—let me go, or I’ll—”
Midway in a gesture as he raised his hand to seize her, his legs shook under him, his voice stopped in his throat, he heaved forward, backward, then down on his face, and lay still in a crumpled mass.
She bent down swiftly, examined him, perceived that he was completely drunk and rose to look for help. It was nearing six o’clock but the houses were still closed against the night. Near her at a corner saloon, a studded glass sign announced:
Bostweiler’s Private Hotel
She hesitated a moment before the squalor and sordidness of the hotel entrance, divining the hideousness into which she had chanced, shuddered and rang the night bell. A colored doorman, sleeping somewhere in the green-lit hallway, called sleepily:
“Come right in!”
She knocked again and again with insistent, angry knocks, until he came stumbling and rubbing his eyes to the door. He smelt horribly of cheap whisky. With his aid she got Dangerfield in and up-stairs. The watcher grinned knowingly and, rather than enter into explanations,she hastily thrust a bill into his hand and dismissed him. Dangerfield on the bed was still unconscious. The room was tawdry, the carpet in shreds, the gas-fixture bent, and the blistered furniture covered with cheap, soiled imitation lace. She locked the door and drew a sofa before it, opened the windows, and sat down in a rocking-chair, her head racked with weary pains, watching the drabs and grays as they scurried before the gorgeous cavalcade of the victorious sun.
All at once Inga awoke with a sense of danger. Dangerfield was standing at the foot of her chair, or rather the specter of Dangerfield looked down at her with drawn lips and pasty face, with twitching nerves. It was late afternoon.
For a moment, startled out of a confused succession of restless dreams, Inga could not realize where she was. Then the squalor of the room, the haggard, tortured face of Dangerfield looking down in remorse, the memory of the long night of struggle came back in a flash. She sprang up hastily.
“I went off to sleep—heavens, how late is it?”
“It’s after three—I’ve been waiting for you,” he said, in a low voice.
“Oh, why didn’t you call me?” she said hastily, struck by the new note of pain and contrition.
He brushed her question aside, staring at her.
“How was it possible—Good God, how could I have brought you here?” He stopped, shuddered, and glanced around at the room.
“You didn’t. I brought you,” she said quickly. “You had—had collapsed.”
“Sit down,” he said.
He drew a chair opposite her, took both her hands in his, and looked at her so long that she began to be embarrassed. Then, all at once, his lips twisted, his eyes filled with tears, and he buried his head in his hands.
“Don’t mind me, Mr. Dan!” she cried in her distress, bending over him. “Don’t think of me!” And, as he continued to dig his hands into his cheeks against the long pent-up emotion, she added: “I’m only happy to have helped you. Really I am.”
He rose suddenly, fighting down a sob, overcome by remorse.
“Good God, where have I dragged you?”
She came to him swiftly and seized his hands with an imperious gesture.
“What do you think I care about that?” she said, with such anger that it shocked him into attention. “To make a man out of you, I’d go through anything—anything, do you hear!”
He searched in his pockets at a sudden remembrance, found the bottle he had bought at the druggist’s the night before, and looked up at her.
“Then why didn’t you take this?” he said curtly.
“What good would that have done?” she said impatiently.
He stared at her a moment and, with a gesture of contempt, flung the bottle against the floor, where it crashed to pieces.
She swayed with a cry of joy and clung to him, her head pressed against his shoulder, as though a sea of perils had returned him safely.
“Why the devil should you care what happens to an old derelict, you queer little creature?” he said slowly, surprised at the trembling in her body.
“Care! Why, if anything had happened—” She broke off, caught her breath just at the moment when she could no longer control herself, and dug her nails into the palms of her hands in an effort to regain her self-control.
“Don’t move—stay where you are—near me,” he said gently, and he drew one arm about her shoulder.
Through the leaden, racking burdens of the night, a flood of cleansing light entered his soul, a passionate thirst for life once more. The world outside was good, full of vibrant, joyful sounds—children’s voices, laughing as they danced to the music of a hurdy-gurdy, the long chatter of scolding sparrows, tiny sounds and yet teeming with life, its curiosity, its health, its response to sensations, pleasant, intense, and intoxicating. The arm he haddrawn about her tightened as though clinging to its salvage in the storm of his mind. Warned by some subtle intuition of the heart, she did not attempt to move away. Instead, one hand crept up until it lay against the rough cheek.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Dan,” she said, in a whisper. “Why, you never could have harmed any one—I know it! I know it isn’t your fault—it couldn’t be!”
“No; it isn’t my fault,” he said mechanically, but his thoughts were of the outer world with its insistent call back to life, to the life which rose in him from the perfumed contact of her straight, young body, the scent of her hair, the softness of her protecting arms, and the warm notes of her whispering voice. All at once he held her from him so that he could look into her flushed face and said solemnly, sadly:
“Inga, have you the right to do this? Don’t you know it’s a grave responsibility you have taken—to force me to go on living, hating everything, hoping nothing—for that’s what you’re doing?”
“You must—you must!” she said tremulously.
His eyes were on her every expression now, and in them was a longing to question and to be answered.
“Why did you come to me—why do you stick to me now?” he said eagerly.
“It’s just so,” she said nervously. “I can’t help it. I couldn’t have let you go out alone—Why, if you saw a child drowning you’d have to save it, wouldn’t you?” He nodded gravely. “Well, that’s the way with me. I just couldn’t be otherwise.”
“I have taken heavily from you,” he said slowly, “long, long, racking hours, and you’ve never complained. You have given me so much and I have had no right.”
She smiled.
“Those were the happiest moments.”
“And after all that,” he said, “you still want to go on—giving to me?”
Her hands came together eagerly as she raised her eyes in supplication.
“Please—oh, you wouldn’t take this from me now!”
“You don’t know, child; you don’t know what you are undertaking,” he said bitterly.
“I want it!”
“And you do all this because——”
“I believe in you.”
He turned away, not quite satisfied, and yet the feeling of what he had contemplated the day before was so coldly insistent that the revulsion urged him to cling to what she offered.
“It’s too much to ask,” he said, hesitating.
“You say that because you do not understand!” she cried, coming to him eagerly, her hand on his shoulder, standing behind him. “You don’t know all it means in my life to have the feeling of really counting.” She stopped as he turned, wondering if, at last, she was going to speak of herself. She wavered and then continued resolutely, “It’s all so useless—being alone—so starved! If you knew what it meant to me, to count, to give to some one, to fight for something, you wouldn’t talk of its being hard on me.”
He looked at her and wondered. He had known women like her before, women of the Northlands and the Old World who never complained, whose joy lay in sacrifice and redeeming. He thought of Pepita, the little Spanish model whose adoration he had not suspected until too late, and, thinking of Pepita, he wondered about Inga. What was the true feeling in her—as much as he would ever understand her? Did the girl love him? He wanted to believe it so keenly, in the weak reaction from the dread decision of the night, longing for something to cling to, that he hesitated, afraid to dissipate a fragile illusion by too brusque a question. Yet, if she did love him? At the very possibility, a new belief in himself awoke, bringing to him that sensation of life at its fullest in the power of inspiring love.
She saw the thronging, tumultuous thoughts which came crowding to his eyes, and nervously turned away. Her retreat frightened him, as such trivial symptoms can instill terror in moments of intense hope. He put his hands over his eyes to repress the too frank questioning in them, and walked to the window to regain his calm.
When he came back to her, determined to discuss matters rationally, he was conscious only of a longing to believe in her, to go forth into life and the sun once more. Yet he strove to be honest.
“This is all very well for now,” he said hurriedly, hardly trusting his voice, “but after—when we are calm, when we can see things as they are, when I face what is ahead, when you realize what you have bound your life to—a derelict—”
“And if I can make you what you were before,” she said, in simple faith.
“You can’t—men like me don’t come back,” he said bitterly, sinking into a chair. “It isn’t simply to live—that’s what you must understand. It’s—it’s to have the power to do what I used to do, and to do that, one must believe in oneself; only that is so hard—once you’ve lost it!”
“That is what I want, Mr. Dan,” she said impulsively. “I feel what there is in you. It comes to me just by your being in the room. I felt it that first night, even before you opened your eyes. I couldn’t help myself. I had to come to you to do what you wanted, to serve you. Do you think I’d have done that if you weren’t something big, something really worth while?”
He looked at her, only too impatient to be convinced, forgetting all his mental whys and wherefores in the instincts toward faith and joy which came to him in the spell of her intimacy.
“I wanted to end it,” he said wistfully, yet already the thing was far away, incredible. “I’d made up my mind.”
“Won’t you let me try?” she cried passionately. “Mr. Dan, let me try—it would be such a big—big thing in my life!”
“Try,” he said impulsively, with a glad leap of his senses, and, even at this moment, it struck him how incongruous, in this sordid interior, was this sudden release toward the beauty and the faith of things.
“And now,” she said hurriedly, “let’s get out of here—out of this awful place!”
He sprang up hastily, cursing himself for his obtuseness, and came face to face with the worn image of himself in the murky mirror. A sudden loathing seized him.
“Good Lord, do I look like that?” he cried.
“Come,” she said smilingly. She stood in the doorway, her hand on the knob, opening the way to him until he came and stood beside her, looking back in revulsion at the tawdry room. “That’s the past—we’ll shut it out forever,” she said softly, and closed the door. “Now give me your hand.”
The hallway was dark. She took his hand and guided him through the musty, oppressive darkness down the creaking, uncertain stairs, never releasing her hold until she had found the door and led him, dazzled, into the mellowness of the day.
The lights were coming out on the avenue one by one when they returned to the Arcade. He stopped, suddenly solicitous of her, on the point of suggesting that she might prefer not to be seen returning thus. But, when this return of the worldly instinct was phrasing a question, shedeliberately slipped her arm through his in a closer intimacy. He laughed contentedly.
“Why do you laugh?” she said, waving her hand to Myrtle Popper, who was on guard at Joey Shine’s window.
“It was an honest laugh,” he said evasively.
The naturalness and the directness of her nature, the simple force of her emotions, unfettered by self-consciousness, in contrast with the worldliness in which he had moved, overcame him, as the clear breath of the open fields sometimes is too overpowering to those who seek it in city weariness.
And so, arm in arm, defiant of the world, they returned to the Arcade where, only a few hours before, he had come in despair and surrender, seeing the end of all things. For a moment, the whole pack of cringing doubts—of himself, of her, of the waking realism of the morrow, of distrust for the enduring quality of dramatic moments—doubts that often caused him to laugh aloud in bitterness, came howling around him. Were the tingling sensations of awaking curiosity, the delight in singing sounds and thronging life, the overwhelming passion to be, to know himself still alive, but the mirage of a fool’s paradise? She felt the inner trouble in him, and drew her arm closer to his, saying, with already a beginning of proprietorship:
“What are you mumbling to yourself like that?”
“Call it a prayer,” he said, half in earnest, half in jest.
“And when in the graveHer laddie they laid,Her heart then broke,And she fervently prayed:O God in Heaven,Let me go, too,And be wi’ my laddie—so guid and true!”
“And when in the graveHer laddie they laid,Her heart then broke,And she fervently prayed:O God in Heaven,Let me go, too,And be wi’ my laddie—so guid and true!”
So sang Millie Brewster in her faint, pleasant soprano, while O’Leary, at the piano, nodded encouragement, and interpolated brilliant roulades into the accompaniment. The skylight was open in deference to the first warmth of the spring, as March went out like a lamb. Tootles, in overalls, so splashed with variegated tints that they might have passed for an impressionistic landscape, was giving the last tender touches to the completed canvas of the Well-dressed Man Contemplated By The Ages. Schneibel, who had stolen up between appointments, in his white dentist’s coat, was dividing his admiration between the contemplation of Tootles’ masterpiece and that critical attention which one great singer bestows upon the performance of another. Mr. Pomello, his high hat pushed back from his forehead, his hands on his cane, was sitting in judgment, with a view to giving Millie a trial performance at the Gloria, the moving-picture theater below, where King O’Leary thundered nightly on the piano. Flick, who had organized the demonstration with the express intention of capturing Mr. Pomello, sat well forward, nodding his head in a romantic, melancholy way, occasionally clearing his throat to convey emotion repressed with difficulty.
“Bravo!” said Tootles loudly, when the lass of bonnie Dundee had been laid away in true ballad form.
“You had me going,” said Flick, rubbing his eyes industriously, while King O’Leary patted the frightened girl on the back in rough encouragement.
“How about it, Pomello?” he said, wheeling on his stool. “That ought to take the house by storm.”
At this moment, a pounding was heard on the wall, followed by several “Bravas!” in Dangerfield’s deep voice.
“I like that better than the first thing she sang,” said Pomello; “got more stuff to it.”
“Sure—the first was just fireworks—grand-opera stuff—opens up the voice,” said O’Leary.
“Well, I don’t know anything about singing, but I know what I like,” said Pomello, who, by this phrase, doubly barred himself from the sphere of the higher criticism. “Sing something more, something sentimental.”
“What would you like?” said Millie.
Pomello reflected. His acquaintance was limited.
“Sing ‘The Rosemary.’”
At the end of the song (“The Rosary” was then only in the beginning of its devastating march), which Millie, with her eyes on O’Leary, sang with surprising fervor and pathos, great tears were rolling down Pomello’s wrinkled face. He was delighted. He hobbled over and shook Millie by the hands, and the engagement was ratified, to the joy of every one.
As a matter of fact, his indecision had only been a pretense. The question had been decided from the moment that Myrtle Popper had indicated her desire. During the last month, Pomello’s infatuation had become public property, though few, perhaps, divined the seriousness of it.
The party broke up, Schneibel fired with enthusiasm,yodeling his way back to the realities of dentistry (than which nothing is more real), while Flick escorted Mr. Pomello with ceremony to the elevator.
“Well, Millie, you’re a professional now, all right!” said O’Leary, laughing. “Monday night’s the night.”
“I could sing anything if you were there,” said Millie, with a grateful glance, “when you’re at the piano, it’s just as though you had your arm—” She stopped, confused at a shout from Tootles, who poked his head around the corner, saying:
“Oh, don’t mind me, Millie!”
“Well, you know what I mean,” said the girl, blushing fiery red under O’Leary’s laughing eyes. “You just make me sing.”
“Sure, I’ll make you sing, all right,” said O’Leary.
“You’re awful kind,” said the girl, holding out her hand. “I know it was you got Pomello interested.”
Now, O’Leary had carefully concealed from her the fact that it was Myrtle, who, in the bigness of her heart, had persuaded him to this act of generosity, divining, perhaps, the mute jealousy slumbering behind Millie’s quiet looks. At this moment Myrtle Popper came in tumultuously.
“Hurrah!” she cried. “I’ve heard the news! Won’t it be grand? I’ll make Pomello pay real hard cash too.”
“You’ll make him?” said Millie, drawing back. She glanced at O’Leary, bit her lip, and became suddenly very quiet.
“Take a look at the great work, Myrtle,” said Tootles, hastily coming to the rescue. O’Leary began a furious procession of ragtime up and down the piano, while Myrtle, unconscious of the jealousy she had aroused, passed behind the canvas.
“Gee, but that’ll go big!” she said, in admiration, seeing only her own portrait, which was indeed flattering.
“Pomello couldn’t take his eyes off it,” said Tootles maliciously.
“Honest, it’s wonderful! Say, isn’t Pansy cute, too?”
“Rather good of ‘the baron’—looks no end of a swell doesn’t he?”
“Sure; you ought to make a million dollars out of that!” said Myrtle, and, after a moment, she added, “Couldn’t you put a ring or two on my fingers—that hand of mine looks awful bare.”
“Flick’s got a couple of the Ready-Made magnates fighting for admission,” said Tootles, ignoring her criticism. “Soon as we land one, won’t we have a celebration though!”
Meanwhile, Millie Brewster had leaned over O’Leary and whispered:
“King, if this is her doings, I won’t have a thing to do with it—do you hear? I won’t take favors from her!”
“Thank you for nothing!” said O’Leary, assuming an offended air, while his hands descended upon a resounding chord in the bass. He managed to look so fearfully angry that the girl’s heart sank at once.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered contritely; “but I won’t be patronized by her.”
“I suppose I don’t count,” said O’Leary, who seized the strategic attitude. “Millie, I’m ashamed of you!”
But at the moment when the girl was humbly imploring him with her eyes to forgive her, a new bombshell was exploded by Myrtle’s emerging and saying:
“King, something I want to say to you—excuse me everybody!”
O’Leary shrugged his shoulders, arose, and followed her.
No sooner had they left the room than Tootles advanced with a reproachful air.
“My dear girl—playing the game wrong—that’s not the clever way! Keep him guessing. Crude, very crude!”
“What does she throw herself at him that way for?” said Millie miserably.
“Whatever she does, don’tyoumake a scene,” said Tootles, still in his superior manner. “Don’t be such an idiot as to show your jealousy.”
“How about you?” said the girl rebelliously.
“How about me—what do you mean, how about me?”
“And Pansy?”
“Miss Pansy Hartmann is nothing in my life,” said Tootles, classically cold. “I admire her, but that is all.”
“Well, that’s a blessing—for I saw her yesterday lunching at Healy’s with that Portuguese lawyer!”
“You saw her with Drinkwater?” said Tootles furiously, dropping his brushes in his excitement.
“Yesterday.”
“And she swore to me—” said Tootles, who began struggling out of his overalls in such indignation that the rest of the sentence was lost.
“No use—she’s out,” said Millie hastily, as Tootles bolted for the door.
“You saw her?” said Tootles wildly. “The little vixen, and I believed her, yes, believed her smiling, treacherous eyes!”
“Mr. Kidder, Mr. Kidder,” said Millie, now genuinely alarmed at the fury with which Tootles flung paints and paint-brushes on the floor and stamped on them, “you mustn’t take on like that!”
“That ends it—this is the end!” said Tootles, whose usually genial face was contorted with rage. “I wouldn’t believe her again if she swore on her mother’s grave.”
All at once, he gave a prolonged “Aha!” seized a knife, and rushed to the canvas. The girl in horror flung herself on him, crying to him not to destroy it.
“No; I won’t destroy it, but I’ll destroy her!” said Tootles wildly. “Let me go!”
“What are you going to do?” said Millie, still clinging to his arm.
“I’m going to paint her out,” said Tootles, as savagely as though he had said, “I’m going to have her blood.”
He flung away the knife, and, with an exclamation of delight, sprang for his brushes. In five minutes, in place of the glowing complexion of Pansy the tantalizing, the swarthy, copper-colored hue of an Ethiopian emerged!
“Good heavens, what have you done now?” exclaimed Millie, aghast.
“I have blotted her image forever from my memory!” said Tootles.
“You’ve ruined it,” said Millie, wringing her hands. “I didn’t mean to tell you—honest, I didn’t!”
Tootles, without conveying to her how easily the transformation could be effected back to the Caucasian, assumed the air of one chastened by suffering and said nobly:
“It is over. I thank you.”
Meanwhile, O’Leary had followed Myrtle into the hall, rather puzzled by the anxiety he had read in her look, not at all annoyed at being quarreled over by two pretty women.
“Suppose she’s going to make a scene, too,” he thought.
But, to his surprise, Myrtle, without seeming to have taken the slightest notice of what had just passed, said directly,
“King, you’ve got to take me out to dinner to-night—alone!”
“What’s up?”
“I’ve just got to talk to you. There’s no jolly—it’s dead serious.”
“Can’t you tell me now?”
“No, no,” she said hastily and, with some confusion, she came closer and wound her fingers in his coat. “I’ve never asked you to take me anywhere like this before, have I?”
“No; that’s a fact.”
“And you don’t think I would now if there wasn’t something I just had to talk over with you,” she said impulsively. “You’re the only living soul I can come to for advice, and I need it bad and quick.”
O’Leary looked at her and drew his eyes together.
“Is that straight?”
“Dead straight.”
“All right; it’s a go,” he said solemnly. “But I’ve got to be at the theater by seven-thirty.”
“I’ll be ready in an hour.”
He nodded acquiescence, more and more puzzled by her manner, and as she ran down to her manicuring, he hesitated at the door of his studio, made a wry face, and went down the hall to Dangerfield’s. The door was open. Belle Shaler was on the model-stand in the garb of a street urchin, hands on her hips, hair tousled, bare-armed, and throat revealed through the ragged blouse. The great yellow rug had been rolled to one side, and two easels were pitched. At one, Inga was working, while, at the other, Dangerfield was filling in a rapid sketch. He paid no attention to O’Leary’s entrance, bending eagerly to his work, clad in loose-flowing corduroy that bore the marks of a hundred skirmishes of the brush, and a gray-flannel shirt.
“Hello, King! Ain’t I a Venus in these mud-rags?” said Belle, with a shrug of her shoulders, for the reasons of this pose, which obliterated her natural graces, were beyond her comprehension. “Say, how did it go? Did Millie land him?”
“Hooked him clear through the gills. Monday’s the night.”
“Hold that pose!” said Dangerfield sharply. Inga sent a warning glance toward O’Leary.
“’Scuses!” said Belle hastily. In Dangerfield’s presence she was unaccountably subdued.
King O’Leary moved silently behind Inga, with an exclamation of pleasure at the charm of her arrangement. Under her deft fingers, the urchin on the model-stand had been blended into the dainty color-scheme for a magazine cover, and, instead of the shabby reality, a fragile, idealized figure with grapevines and clustered purple grapes greeted his eyes.
Then he turned to Dangerfield’s easel with renewed curiosity. Against the white canvas, a figure stood out in glaring boldness, done in flowing, powerful lines, a figure all human flesh and greedy life, defiant, common, vital, astonishing in the power of its ugliness, which no longer had the quality of ugliness, so alive and instantaneous was the unifying spark of the actual which held it together. And King O’Leary understood.
“God, that’s it!” he exclaimed.
“Rest—finished,” said Dangerfield. He glanced a moment at the sketch and turned away without further interest.
Belle Shaler strolled down, gave a look at the canvas, whistled, and sauntered over to Inga. It was plain to see which picture she preferred. Mr. Cornelius, who had been curled up in an easy chair reading, came up, smiling and nodding.
“What strength of a brute, and still whatfinesse, eh?” he said, admiring it as a true connoisseur.
O’Leary nodded silently, and was joined by Belle, whotried to comprehend what they could see in it, not realizing that the artist had revealed to them secrets of which she herself was ignorant, the soul of a child of the people, tolerant of hardships and tragedies, smiling down the giant, useless fabrics of conventions and laws, fatalist and stoic, indomitable in her curiosity and enjoyment.
“He’s coming back fast,” thought O’Leary, watching from the corner of his eye the sea-blue eyes of Inga lighting up with an overwhelming joy.
Dangerfield returned for a second inspection, head on one side, his thumb to his teeth. He started to take up a charcoal, then shook his head, and, lifting the canvas, put it aside.
“Yes; she’s bringing him around,” said O’Leary wisely to himself. “No doubt about it—but he’s far from tame yet.”
At six o’clock, Myrtle Popper tucked her arm under King O’Leary’s and tripped out as joyfully as though she were carrying him away forever into regions of blue skies and green islands.
“Now you’ve got me, where are you going to take me, or, rather, where am I going to take you?” said O’Leary warily, for he had pondered much over the object of the evening and had become suspicious. Myrtle’s light-heartedness and her eagerness did not fit exactly into the rôle of a maiden in distress. Still, you could never tell with women.
“Sure, are you objectin’ to a good-looking girl hanging on your arm,” said Myrtle, laughing with the delight of having accomplished her object. “Shall we go down the stairs or wait for that poky old elevator?”
“Thank you; we’ll take the elevator,” said O’Leary hastily. “You’re a deal too dashing and flashing to-night, Myrtle darlin’.”
“Now, just what are you insinuatin’ by that?” said the girl, her glowing eyes belying the sternness of her words.
“I mean that I wouldn’t be down the first flight but my arm would be slipping around your waist. Now, don’t be looking at me like that; it’s yourself is to blame.”
The color came suddenly into her cheeks.
“You don’t really care?” she said softly.
King O’Leary laughed and pressed the electric button a second time so that the buzzing sound filled the shaft, while his companion stamped her foot and turned away petulantly.
Sassafras emerged with rolling eyes.
“Our chauffeur is waiting?” said O’Leary, adopting the methods of Tootles.
“Yassir—yassir,” said Sassafras, whom nothing astonished. “And Mrs. Van Astorbilt am reclinin’ in de car.”
“Well, whatareyou going to do with me?” said O’Leary, continuing in the light tone as a precautionary measure until the attack had shown its purpose.
“Do I have to tell you where to dine?” said Myrtle scornfully.
O’Leary performed a careful search of his pockets.
“We might buck the high places, if you ain’t too ravenous!”
She shrugged her shoulders, and, disdaining to answer his levity, led him down Columbus Avenue to Rossi’s, where, it being early, they found a deserted corner, and O’Leary took up the menu with an occasional stolen glance at his companion, who had become strangely silent.
“Minestroneand—hello, here’s luck!” he said. “Gnocci Milanese!Ever tasted them? They’re grand!”
“All right; I don’t care,” said the girl, without shifting her eyes.
“Ravioliand a sweet, and don’t annoy us with any olives,” said O’Leary to the waiter. “Quite a place!”
He turned for an inspection of the restaurant known to a chosen few. Across the room, a party of Italians and Spaniards from the Opera were finishing an early supper.
“Say, that’s Marino and de Segga,” said O’Leary, in a whisper, indicating the reigning tenor and the famous baritone.
“I don’t care,” said his companion sharply.
King O’Leary, perceiving that the issue could no longer be avoided, said:
“Say, you do look awful serious.”
“I told you it was serious, didn’t I?”
“Yes; and you’ve got me guessing!”
Something in his tone made her draw back and consider. Presently she said:
“Wonder just what you thought I could have meant by—serious!”
O’Leary balanced his knife on his finger thoughtfully, and finally decided to answer.
“I was kind of worried.”
“How so?”
“Well, I didn’t know,” he said slowly, “but what you might have been getting in—in too deep.”
“Into trouble?”
“Yes; into trouble—you see a queer side of life. It isn’t every girl can steer a clear course.”
“Yes; I’ve taken chances,” she said and stopped. She looked at him with anxious scrutiny. “King, suppose it were so?”
“What do you mean?” he said, frowning.
“Suppose I have got in too deep—deeper than I mean to go?” She looked down at her hands. “What then?”
He looked up sharply, then smiled.
“It ain’t so.”
“Suppose it were?” she said breathlessly.
“It ain’t so,” he repeated quietly. He leaned over and patted her hand. “I know you, girl; you’re not that kind.”
“There’s lots of temptations.”
“Not for you,” he said, reassured in his conviction. “You’re straight, and you’ve got a good head on your shoulders.”
“That doesn’t always hold.”
“It does with you. Whatever you’ll do, Myrtle, you’ll do just what you’ve planned out and what your head tells you to do.”
“I don’t know as I like that,” she said, frowning at the implication that she was not of feminine frailty.
“Well, it’s true.”
“You don’t think I can be carried away, then?” she said, with a heightened flush. “You’re the last to say that.”
Luckily, the arrival of theminestronebroke in upon a delicate subject, and the conversation, subject to the censorship of the waiter, became desultory. Dinner over, she leaned forward, her elbows on the table, her eyes full on his face, and said:
“King, shall I marry Mr. Pomello?”
He was so astonished that she herself could not repress a smile.
“Say that again,” he said, bewildered.
“I want your advice. Ought I to marry Mr. Pomello?”
“What the devil do you want to marry an old crutch for?” he said, more irritated than he would have believed possible. “Has he asked you?”
“Twenty times—I’ve been putting him off. It’s got to be yes or no to-night, and that’s no jolly. It’s take it or leave it.”
“Why the deuce do you come to me?”
“Because,” she said softly, “you’re the only one I can go to, and, King, it’s a big decision.”
“I don’t see why you want to marry him,” he said slowly. “He’s got money, I suppose.” She nodded. “Much?”
“How much should you say?”
“Oh, forty or fifty thousand.”
“More than that.”
“A hundred.”
“Higher.”
“Come off!”
“King, Mr. Pomello’s worth between three and four hundred thousand. Say, I’m not throwing a bluff. Straight goods. He told me so, offered to prove it.”
“How the devil——”
“Made it in moving pictures. He got in on the ground floor, and, King, if I marry him, he’ll make a will and leave it all to me.”
O’Leary was silent, staring at her. The thought of the price she might command seemed to make her a thousand times more desirable. He even felt a pang of jealousy.
“Gee, this is serious!” he said, and, being in a quandary, he rapped loudly on the table and selected the biggest cigar which was brought him.
Myrtle Popper was watching him with excited glance, her breath coming and going more rapidly as she noted the perturbation caused by the announcement.
“Of course, it ain’t a question of love,” he said more quietly, as he felt himself fortified behind a cloud of fragrant smoke.
“Not on my part.”
“Do you think you can carry it through?” he said, with frank curiosity. Down in his heart he was wondering at the insensibility of women in the very things in which men give them the greatest reverence.
“He’s kind, very kind,” she said, reflecting. “He’ll do anything I want, and, King, it sounds cold-blooded—but he’s over sixty, and he ain’t strong at that.”
“Gee!” said O’Leary.
Neither spoke for a long moment.
“It is cold-blooded,” he said, at last.
“It’s a bargain,” she said abruptly, shrugging hershoulders. “He wants me; he’s getting what he wants. If he sees it that way, why, it’s square enough.”
“Does he see it that way?”
“I’ve been honest. I’ve told him what I tell you. It’s understood like that between us.”
“Why do you even hesitate?” he said.
She stared beyond him.
“It would be hard,” she said simply, and looked at him with half-closed eyes.
He was so astonished at the disclosure that she had made that he felt like repeating his questions, to convince himself that what she had told him could be true, that this girl manicurist from Joey Shine’s barber shop could, for a nod of her head, leap forward a dozen generations.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” he said, at last.
“I don’t suppose many girls in my position would have put him off this way,” she said meditatively. “There ain’t much to look ahead to in the manicuring line—a few years of good looks and being taken out, and then just sitting around.”
“And if you marry, why, it means even more work, don’t it,” he said, “cooking and the housework—and the kids. No; I can’t see as there are two sides to it.”
“There are two sides, though,” she said, and she drew a great breath that went through her young, glorious body. She drew back and stretched out her arms as though every muscle had risen in protest. “But a girl can’t be doing the askin’, you see.”
He remained frowning at the cloth so long that she said:
“Did you hear what I said?”
He nodded.
“And you remember what I said to you that afternoon about settling down and home and all the rest?”
“The afternoon I kissed you?”
Her face went red, and she turned away all at once. A wave of pity went through him that he should have been tempted by his vanity, for he knew that it lay no deeper than that. He swore at himself and said:
“So you’ve come to me for advice?”
She turned quickly.
“And what do you say?” she said, so low that he could scarcely distinguish it.
“Do you mean if I told you not to do it, you’d chuck it to the winds?”
She started twice to answer and stopped. Finally, she said:
“If you told me your reason—I would.”
“Myrtle, you did right to come to me,” he said decisively. “This is my answer: Placed as you are, with what’s ahead, there’s no two ways about it—it’s too big, too wonderful. Marry him!”
She did not move. The words seemed to have left so little impression on her that he was wondering if she had understood them, when, all at once, she looked up and said:
“You mean that?”
“I do.”
She rose, nodded to him to follow, and went out of the restaurant. They walked home in silence, and she did not take his arm. In the Arcade, by the brass entrance of the Gloria Theater, he turned to her abruptly, conscience-stricken, and yet fortified by the thought that he had been square enough not to stand in her way.
“What are you going to say to him?” he said anxiously, taking the hand which she gave him heavily. She turned and he saw that her eyes were filled with tears.
“Look here,” he said miserably; “I’ve been honest with you, Myrtle.”
“Yes; you’ve been that,” she said, and, with a nod, she hurried away.
King O’Leary had made no mistake. Dangerfield was far from being tamed, and no one understood it better than Inga Sonderson. The day after their return to the Arcade had come the revulsion she had feared. When she had entered, he had looked up without sign of recognition and turned moodily to the solitaire which lay spread before him. She remained half an hour without a word passing between them. She went out and presently returned with a mass of yellow roses, which she distributed about the room, and resumed her waiting attitude. Finally he said:
“Seen the papers?”
“Yes,” she answered, though she knew only of the sensational details of the Garford history through Belle Shaler. But she did not wish to have him discuss them, for she comprehended how keenly the man must be suffering in his vanity.
He laughed his short, bitter laugh, the laugh which sounded like the bark of some wild animal, which was characteristic of his rebellious moods. To her, it was always a danger-signal. She rose and, moving easily, stood before him, young, awake, and smiling. He considered her thus with set glance, plainly resentful.
“Wonder if you know what I’m thinking,” he said, at last.
“I think I do. To-day you must hate me,” she said solemnly. “I’m sorry.”
His face showed too much surprise.
“No; I don’t hate you,” he said shortly, “not you—all the rest.”
“Yes; me, too,” she insisted. “I don’t mind. I understand it.”
He rose without notice of the flowers she had brought in timid offering, and, going to the desk, took up a newspaper, stared at it, and handed it to her. She glanced at it long enough to get the full significance of the photograph and the head-lines:
DAN GARFORD IN THELIMELIGHT AGAIN
Then she deliberately tore it into pieces and threw it into the waste-basket.
“It’s time for lunch; let’s go out.” He shook his head. The suggestion irritated him. “The walk will do you good.”
“Are you going to order me around?” he said, frowning.
“To-day, yes, because you can’t make up your mind,” she said, coming to him with his coat. It was rarely that she took a determined stand. He turned, resenting it.
“We must come to an understanding,” he said irritatedly. “I don’t intend to be told to do this and do that. If I want to cut loose, go wild, I’m going to do it!”
She faced him resolutely.
“Don’t worry; I’m not asking you to do anything—no promises.” She considered a moment, and corrected herself with a smile. “Only one promise.”
He drew back, prepared for an issue, frowning.
“What one?”
“Whatever you do, wherever you go, I am to go with you.”
He glanced at her sharply—the blurred look on his face that she dreaded.
“What! Even nights like night before last!” he said cunningly. That inward struggle which he had been fighting all morning completely transformed the usual kindly look in his eyes, bringing back the glare of a caged animal.