It was as though he were in a nest; the windows were padded with the feathers of snow that had frozen to them overnight. He felt cramped. Then he found that his arm was about a girl and that her head was against his shoulder. She roused and gazed at him drowsily. She sat up, rubbing her fists into her eyes. They stared at each other in amused surprise.
“Well, I never!” she whispered. “Wot liberties ter taik wiv a lady!”
She drew away from him in pretended haughtiness, tilting her chin into the air.
Some one yawned. “Good Lord! We must have been mad.”
Disenchantment spoke in the complaining voice. They turned. The rest of the party were awake, looking bored and fretful.
“I’m aching for some sleep,” Fluffy sighed; “I know I’m going to quarrel with some one. It was you and your wretched Cynaras did this for us, Horace. If I’m not in bed in half-an-hour, I’ll never speak to you again.”
“Why mother, where’s King?” Desire noticed the absence of Mr. Dak.
“If he’s wise, he’s walking back to New York,” Vashti said; “but I think he’s outside, directing the driver.—We certainly were mad. I am tired.”
A discontented silence settled down. Teddy wished that they all would close their eyes and leave him alone with Desire. She was like a wild thing when others were watching; beneath her stillness he could detect her agitation lest he should betray to others that he loved her.
“You’re not cross, too—are you?” he whispered. “Are you, Princess?”
She shook her head. “You made a splendid pillow.”
She gave him no encouragement, so he sank into himself. He tried to recapture his sensations of the night In his dreams he must have been conscious of her; they must have gone together on all manner of adventures. He blamed himself for having slept; if he had kept his vigil, what memories he would have had.
The car halted. The door was opened by Mr. Dak. White and soft as a swan’s breast, gleaming in the early morning sunlight, lay a rolling expanse of unruffled country. Distant against the glassy sky mountains shone imperturbably, like the humped knees of Rip Van Winkles taking their eternal rest.
Mr. Dak beamed with pride. He seemed to be claiming all the credit for the stillness and whiteness, and most especially for the low-roofed farmhouse, with its elms and barns, and its plume of blue smoke curling up hospitably into the frosted silence. He was pathetically eager to be thanked. He looked more like a maiden-aunt than ever.
As the company tumbled out, their self-ridicule was heightened by the patent unsuitability of their attire. The men in their silk-hats and evening-dress, the women in their high-heeled shoes and dainty gowns looked dishonest and shallow apart from their environment.
“Damn!” said Fluffy, giving way to temperament “I want to hide.”
Horace attempted comfort. “You’ll feel better when you’ve had breakfast.”
“I shan’t. I shan’t ever feel better. You oughtn’t to have brought me. You know I’m not responsible after midnight.”
“But you were so keen on waking in the country.”
She swept by him indignantly up the uncleared path, kilting her skirt. “Could I wake when I haven’t slept?”
In the door a young man was standing—a very stolid and sensible young man. He wore oiled boots and corduroy breeches; he was coatless; his sleeves were rolled up and, despite the cold, his shirt was unbuttoned at the neck. In an anxious manner Mr. Dak was explaining to him the situation. As the others came up he was introduced as Sam; he at once began to speak of breakfast.
“I don’t want any breakfast,” Fluffy pouted ungraciously; “all I want is a place to lie down.”
Sam eyed her rather contemptuously—the way a mastiff might have looked at Twinkles.
“The wife’s bathing the babies; but I daresay it can be managed.” He stepped back into the hall and shouted, “Mrs. Sam! Mrs. Sam!”
Mrs. Sam appeared with a child in her arms, which she had hastily wrapped in a towel. She was a wholesome, smiling, deep-breasted young woman, with a face as placid as a Madonna’s. Three beds were promised and the ladies immediately retired.
“Cross, aren’t they?” said Sam, before the last skirt had rustled petulantly up the stairs.
“Rather,” Horace assented.
“It’s to be expected,” said Mr. Dak.
“Expected! Is it?” Sam scratched his head. “Well, all I can say is if a woman doesn’t choose to be agreeable, she can go somewhere else, as far as I’m concerned.”
It was a rambling old house, paneled, many-windowed, and full of quaint furniture. The room in which breakfast was set was a converted kitchen, with shiny oak-chairs and a wide open-fireplace in which great logs blazed and crackled. It was cheerful with the strong reflected light thrown in by the newly laundered landscape. From the next room came the rumble of farm-hands talking; as the door opened for the maid to bring in dishes, the smell of baking bread and coffee entered. When the guests had seated themselves, their host became busy about serving.
“I used to be a bit wild myself,” he said. “I knew Broadway as well as any man. But it made me tired—there’s nothing in it. If you want to be really happy, take my advice: settle down and have babies.”
Mrs. Sam returned. Having dressed the fair-haired mite she was carrying, she gave it into her husband’s care. He took it on his knee and commenced spooning food into its mouth. Drawing nearer to the fire, she set about bathing her youngest. Teddy watched her as she stooped to kiss the kicking limbs, laughing and keeping up a flow of secret chatter. Neither she nor her husband apologized for this intimate display of domesticity. Sometimes he caught her quiet eyes. They made him think of his mother’s. Try as he would, he could not prevent himself from comparing her with the women upstairs. Old standards, odd glimpses of his own childhood flitted across his memory. “These people are married,” he told himself. How foolish the cynicisms of last night sounded now!
“So I ran away from towns and the women they breed; I became a farmer and married her,” Sam was saying. “I don’t reckon I did so badly.”
When the meal was ended, Mr. and Mrs. Sam excused themselves and went about their work. Mr. Dak lit a cigar; before the first ash had fallen, he was nodding.
Horace and Teddy drew up to the logs, toasting themselves and sitting near together. There was a distinct atmosphere of disappointment. They glanced at each other occasionally, saying nothing. It was an odd thing, Teddy reflected—the men whom he met at Vashti’s apartment rarely had anything to say to each other. They met distrustfully as the women’s friends. They never talked of their interests or displayed any curiosity; yet most of them were distinguished in their own line and would have been knowable, if met under other circumstances.
Horace glanced up and spoke abruptly in a lowered voice. “When I was at Baveno one summer, I ran across an old man. He had a cottage in a vineyard half a mile up the hill, overlooking Maggiore. He came every year all the way from Madrid to photograph the view from his terrace. He thought it the most beautiful view in the world, and was as jealous of letting any one else share it as if it had been a woman. He had taken thousands of pictures of it, all similar and yet all different He was always hoping to get two that were alike; but the light on snow-mountains is fickle. I suppose he was a little cracked. He had fooled away his career, and was old and hadn’t married. When he went back to Madrid, it was only to earn money so as to be able to return and to take still more photographs next year.—Can you guess why I’ve told you?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Because we’re like that—you and I. We let a woman who’s as unpossessable as a landscape, become a destructive habit with us. You’re not very old yet, but you’ll find out that there are women in the world who can never be possessed. There’s only one thing to do when you meet one—run away before she becomes a habit.”
“Don’t you think that’s a bit cowardly?” Teddy objected.
“In her heart every woman wants to marry and be like—— Well, like Mrs. Sam was with those kiddies.”
“Go on believing. It’s good that you should believe it. But don’t put your belief to the test.” Horace leant forward and tapped him on the knee. “Go back to England while you can.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I think you do. Fluffy isn’t discreet over other people’s affairs. You’ve fallen in love with a dream, my boy—with an exquisite, unrealizable romance. Keep your dreams for your work; don’t try to find ’em in life—they aren’t there. Look what’s happened this morning through following a dream into the daylight. Here we sit, a pair of foolish tragedies in evening-dress, while our ideals are sleeping off their tempers upstairs.”
When Teddy frowned and didn’t answer, Horace smiled. “I know how it is. I’ve been through it. You oughtn’t to get angry; anything that I’m saying applies twice as forcibly to myself. Look here, Gurney, your affection for Desire is made up of memories of how you’ve loved her. She’s given you nothing. That isn’t right. Neither she, nor her mother, nor Fluffy know how to——”
“Desire——”
“No. Hear me out There are women who never take a holiday from themselves. They’re too timid—too selfish. They’re afraid of marrying; they distrust men. They’re afraid of having children; they worship their own bodies. They loath the disfigurement of child-bearing. All their standards are awry. They regard the sacredness of birth as defilement—think it drags them down to the level of the animals. They make love seem ugly. They’ve got a morbid streak that makes them fear everything that’s blustering and genuine. Their fear lest they should lose their liberty keeps them captives. They’re slaves of freedom, starving their souls and living for externals. Because they’re women, their nature cries out for men; but the moment they’ve dragged the soul out of a man their weak passion is satisfied. They have the morals of nuns and the lure of courtesans. They’re suffocating and unhealthy as tropic flowers.—I’ve been at it too long, but I want you to get out while you can.”
All this was spoken in the whisper of a conspirator lest Mr. Dak should be aroused. It was as though Horace had raised a mask, revealing behind his bored good-humor a face emaciated with longings. Teddy wanted to be angry—felt he ought to be angry; but he couldn’t. “I’d rather we didn’t discuss Desire,” he said coldly. “You see, my case is different from yours. I intend to marry her.”
“My dear boy, it’s not different; I was no more a trifler than you are—I intended to marry Fluffy. I gave up a good woman—a good woman who’s waiting for me now. But I’m like that old man at Baveno; the unpossessable haunts me. I’ve been infatuated so long that I can’t break myself of the habit. But you haven’t. You’re young, with a life before you. For God’s sake go back to the simple good people—the people you understand. Your mother wasn’t a Desire, I’ll warrant; if she had been, you wouldn’t be her son. A man commits a crime against his children when he willfully stoops below his mother to the girl he worships. Desire’ll never belong to you, even though you marry her. She’s not of your flesh. Her pretty, baby hands’ll tear the wings off your idealism. She won’t even know she’s doing it. You’ve made your soul the purchase-price of love, while she—she commits sacrilege against love every hour.” He gripped him by the arm. “Cut loose from her while there’s time. She doesn’t know what you’re offering.”
“Shish!” Mr. Dak was sitting up, a finger pressed against his mouth.
Some one stirred behind them. In the middle of the room Desire was standing. Her hands were clasped against her breast as though she held a bird. Through the windows the purity of the snow-covered country formed a dazzling background for her head and shoulders. The gold in the bronze of her hair glistened. She might have been posing for a realist painting of the immaculate conception. There was a misty, pained looked in the grayness of her eyes—an eloquence of yearning.
“Teddy.”
That was all. It was the second time. It meant more than if she had held out her arms to him. Her clear, lazy voice, speaking his name, seemed to mark the end of evasion. He went to her without a word. There was the heat of tears behind his eyes and a swollen feeling in his heart. The passion she had roused in him at other times sank into gentleness.
The things that Horace had been saying were true—he knew it; but if his love could reach her imagination, they would prove them false together. What was the good of love if it couldn’t do that? Probably Hal had thought to do the same for Vashti, and Horace for Fluffy—all the men who had loved in vain had promised themselves to do just that; but they hadn’t loved with sufficient obstinacy—with sufficient courage.
He helped her into her wraps. They passed out into the gold and silver landscape. It was like entering into a new faith—like leaving deceit behind. Merriness was in the air. Birds fluttered out of hedges, making the snow glitter in their exit. From farms out of sight, roosters blew shrill challenges, like trumpeters riding through a Christmas faeryland. Humping their knees against the horizon, mountains lay hushed in their eternal rest.
There was scarcely a sound save the crunch of their footsteps. At a turn, where the lane descended and the house was lost to sight, she drew closer. “You may take my arm if you like.”
He thrilled to the warmth of it. His fingers closed upon the slimness of her wrist. Their bodies came together, separated and came together with the unevenness of the treading.
She laughed softly. “It’s like a legend. It’s ever so much better than our other good times.”
“I’m glad you think that.” He pressed against her. “We’ve always talked across hotel-tables and in theatres; we’ve always been going somewhere or doing something up till now. We’ve never met only to be together. It was a little vulgar, wasn’t it, buying all our pleasures with money?”
“A little, and stupid when we had ourselves.”
They spoke in whispers; there was no one to hear what they said.
“Horace was persuading you to go away?”
“Yes.”
“Because of me? He was right. Are you going?”
“Never.”
“You ought to go. I’m—I’m glad you’re not going.”
On they went, heedless of direction. At times their lips grew silent, but their hearts twittered like birds. They did not look at each other. Strange that they should be so shy after so much boldness! When one saw some new beauty to be admired, a hugging of the arm would tell it.
They came to a wood—an enchanted place of maple and silver birch. The squirrel’s granary was full; there was no sound of life. It was a sylvan Pompeii frozen in its activities by the avalanche from the clouds. Trees stood stiffly, like arrested dancers, sheathed in their scabbards of burnished ice. Boughs hung heavy with snow blossoms. Scrub-oak and berries of winter-green wrought mosaics of red and brown on the silver flooring. Over all was the coffined stillness of death. Here and there a solitary leaf shone more scarlet, like the resurrection hope of a lamp kept burning in the hollow of a shrine. It was a forsaken temple of broken arches. Summer acolytes, with their flower-faces, no longer fidgeted on the altar-steps. The choir of birds had fled. The sun remained as priest and sole worshiper. Night and morning he raised the host to the wintry tinkling of crystal bells. Down a far vista, as they plunged deeper, their attention was held by a steady brightness—a pond which glowed like a stained-glass window. By its withered sedges they sat down.
“It’s like—-”
“Yes, isn’t it?”
“I was a little girl then. Meester Deek, was I a dear little girl?”
“The dearest in the world. Not half so dear as you are now.”
“Ah, you would say that; you’re always kind. If—if you only knew, I was much dearer then.”
He was holding her hand. Slowly he unbuttoned her glove. She watched him idly. He drew it off and raised the slender fingers to his lips.
“You always told me I had beautiful hands.”
He kissed the fingers separately and then the palm, which was delicate as a rose-leaf.
“And don’t miss the little mole on the back; mother used to say that it told her when I had been bad.”
So he kissed the little mole on the back as well. Curious that he should take so little, when his heart cried out for so much! His head was swimming. He felt nothing, saw nothing but her presence.
“I wouldn’t have let you do that once,” she whispered.
In the long silence that followed, the snow-laden trees shivered, muttering their suspense. Each time he tried to meet her eyes, she looked away as though his glance scorched her.
“My dear! My dearest!”
She did not answer.
“I love you. I’ve always loved you. I can’t live without you. You’re more to me than anything in the world.”
“Don’t say that” Her voice trembled. “It’s terrible to love people so much; you give them such power to hurt you. I might die, or I might love some one else, or——”
“But you don’t—you wouldn’t.”
His arm stole about her neck. Like a child fondling a child, he tried to coax her face towards him. He yearned, as if his soul depended on it, to rest his lips on hers. She smiled, closing her eyes in denial. As he leant out, she turned her face swiftly aside. He kissed her where the little false curl quivered.
“Oh, Meester Deek, why must you kiss me? Where’s the good of it? Can’t we be just friends?”
“All my life I’ve loved you,” he pleaded hoarsely. “Doesn’t it mean anything to you? Care for me a little—only a little, Desire. Say you do, and I’ll be content.”
“I’m not good,” she whispered humbly. “You don’t know anything about me; and yet you’ve seen what I am. My friends are all so gay; I like them to be gay. And I want to be an actress; and I live for clothes and vanities. You’d soon get sick of me if we married.—Dear Meester Deek, please let’s be as we were. I’ve tried to spare you because I don’t love you so as to marry you. I couldn’t give up my way of living even for you. I never could love you as you deserve.”
“But you do love me,” he urged. “Look at the way we’ve gone about together. I’ve never tired you, have I? If I had, you wouldn’t have wanted to see me so much. You must love me, Desire.” Then, in a voice which was scarcely above a breath, “I would ask so little if you married me.”
“You dear fellow!”
She laid her cool cheek against his, trying to give comfort for what she had done. Their bodies grew hushed, listen-ing for each other. The wood, with its snow-paved aisles and arcades of twisted turnings, became a white cathedral in, which their hearts beat as one and worshiped.
“You do love me, Princess.”
“I’m cold,” she whispered mournfully. “I’m trying to feel what I ought to be feeling, but I can’t. I’m disappointed. God left something out when He made me. If only you weren’t so fine, but—— My dear, you’re better than any man I ever met. I couldn’t be good the way you are, and I’m ashamed to be worse. Sometimes I’m almost bitter against you for your goodness. My beautiful mother.—I’m all she has. And there’s your family. I haven’t any. I’ve missed so much. Surely you under-stand?”
“Darling, I want to make it all up to you. I want to give you everything.”
“And I—I can give you nothing.” She closed her eyes tiredly. “I’m so young—so young. I don’t think I want to be married. So much may happen. If we married, everything would be ended; there’d be nothing to dream about. We’d know everything.” Her face moved against his caressingly. “But it is so sweet to be loved.”
He laughed softly. “You will marry me, Princess. You will. One day you’ll want to know everything. I’ll wait till you’re ready.”
She let him draw her to him. Her eyelids drooped. She lay in his arms pulseless. The silkiness of her hair trembled against his forehead.
“Give me your lips.” His voice was thirsty.
She did not stir.
“Just this once.”
She rested her hands on his shoulders. The moist sweet mouth shuddered as he pressed it. He clung to it; an eternity was in the moment. He was drinking her soul from the chalice of her body. Gently she pushed him from her. It was over—this ecstasy to which all his life had been a preface.
She crumpled forward, her knees drawn up, burying her face in her hands.
He was dizzy. The world swung under him.
“I’m not crying,” she panted brokenly. “I’m not glad, and I’m not sorry. No one ever kissed me like that.—Oh, please don’t touch me. I ought to send you away forever.”
He knelt beside her, conscience-stricken. It was as if he had done her a great wrong. Passion was tossed aside by compassion. As he knelt, he kissed timidly the quivering hands which hid her eyes from him.
“Forgive me, my darling. You couldn’t send me away. I shall never leave you.”
“Poor you! There’s nothing to forgive.” It was a little child talking. Making bars of her fingers, she peered out at him. “If I let you stay, will you promise not to blame me—never to think I’ve led you on when—when I don’t marry you?”
“I won’t blame you,” his voice was strained and husky, “but I’ll wait for you forever.”
“Will you? All men say that.” She shook her head wisely. “I wonder?”
She tidied her hair. It gave him a thrilling sense of possession to be allowed to watch her. When he had helped her to rise, he stooped to brush the snow from her. Suddenly he fell to his knees in a wild abandon of longing, and reverently kissed the hem of her gown.
“Meester Deek, don’t. To see you do that—it hurts.”
They walked through the wood in silence, retracing their old footsteps. At the point where it was lost to sight, they gazed back, hand-in-hand, to the sacred spot where all had happened. The snow would melt; they might come in search of the place one day—they might not find it. Would they come alone or together? Their hands gripped more closely; the present at least was theirs.
The storm of emotion which had rocked them, had left them exhausted. They had said so much without words; the eloquence of language seemed inadequate. Each thought as it rose to their lips seemed too trifling for utterance.
As they turned from the wood into the road, she began to whistle softly. He listened. Memory set the tune to words:
“So, honey, jest play in your own backyard,
Don’t mind what dem white chiles say.”
“I can’t bear it.”
She glanced at him sidelong. “Now, old dear, h’if I wants ter whistle, why shouldn’t I?”
“It’s as though you were telling me, I don’t want you.’ You sang it in the Park that night.”
“But she doesn’t want him, perhaps. There! But she does a little. Does that make him feel better? Come, let’s be sensible. You don’t recommend love by getting tragic. Take my arm and stop tickling my hand. I’m going to ask you a question.—Hasn’t there ever been another girl?”
“Never, upon my——”
“You needn’t be so fierce in denying. I didn’t ask you whether you’d killed anybody.”
“I believe you almost wish there had been another girl” She shrugged her shoulders. “My darling mother was before me—you forgot that. But I don’t mind her.”
“I think,” he said, smiling at the mysticism of the fancy, “I think I must have been loving you even then. Yes, I’m sure it was the you in her, before ever I knew you, that I was loving.”
She glanced at him tauntingly. “I’m afraid I’ve not been so economic; you’ll hate me because I haven’t. Shall I tell you about all my lovers?”
“I won’t listen.”
But she insisted. Whether it was truth or invention that she told him, he could not guess. All he knew was that, having lowered her barriers, she was carefully replacing them for her defense. Her way of doing it was to make him suspect that he was only an incident in a long procession; that all this poetry of passion, which for him had the dew on it, had been experienced by her already; that she had often watched men travel through weeks and months from trembling into boldness; that Love to her was the clown in Life’s circus and that she was proof against the greed of his mock humility.
“For God’s sake, stop!”
“Why?” Her tone was innocent of offense.
“If it’s all true, this isn’t the time to confess it.”
“Confess it! D’you think I’m ashamed, then?” She withdrew her arm. “Thank you, I can walk quite nicely by myself.”
He tried to detain her. She shook him off and ran ahead. As he followed, his eyes implored her. She did not turn. Between the white cage of hedges she whistled her warning,
“So, honey, jest play in your own backyard.”
He wondered how any one so beautiful could be so cruel. She seemed to regard herself as a shrine at which it was ordained that men should worship, while her right was to view them with neither heat nor coldness. “Slaves of freedom”—Horace’s words came back.
He caught up with her. “Why did you tell me? I didn’t mean to speak crossly.”
“Didn’t you?”
“I didn’t, really. I’m sorry. But why did you tell me?”
“Because I wanted to be honest: to let you know the kind of girl I am. And because,” her eyes flooded, “because you’re the first man who ever kissed me like that and—and I didn’t want to let you know it—and I wish I hadn’t let you kiss me now.”
She didn’t give him her lips this time. With her face averted, she lay trembling in his arms without a struggle. While his lips wandered from her hair to her cheeks, to her throat, she seemed unconscious of what he was doing. “I do like being kissed by you,” she murmured.
“You’re so fragrant, so soft, so sweet, so like a lily,” he whispered.
Her finger went up to her mouth. “Am I fragrant? That isn’t me. That’s just soap.”
She sprang from his embrace laughing; he joined her in sheer gladness that their quarrel was ended.
As they came into sight of the farmhouse she insisted that he should behave himself.
“But you’re walking further away from me,” he objected, “than you would from a stranger you’d only just met. No wonder Horace thinks you don’t care for me.”
“Well, and who said I did?” She slanted her eyes.
“Oh, well—— But before other people, I wish you wouldn’t ignore me so obviously. It makes me humiliated.”. “That’s good for you.”
Mr. Sam was splitting logs by the wood-pile. He laid down his ax and came towards them.
“You’ve missed it,” he chuckled. “We’ve had a fine old row. They’ve queer notions of enjoying themselves, your city folks.—Has anything happened! I guess it has. When Golden-Hair got through with her snooze, she came down and started things going. She wanted to know whose fault it was that she had a head-ache, and whose fault it was she’d come here, and a whole lot besides. Her beau told her straight that he’d had enough of it, and got the car out. Mr. Dak seemed frightened that it would be his turn next; he said he was going too. So they all piled in, quarreling like mad, a regular happy little party. Daresay they’re still at it.”
“But what about us?” Desire looked blank. “How do we get back?”
“No need to, unless you’re in a hurry. There’s plenty of room; we’ll be glad to have you. But if you must go, there’s a station ten miles distant; I can get the sleigh out.”
Teddy tried to persuade her to stay a day longer. The country was changing her. Who knew what a few more walks in the silver wood might accomplish? New York meant Fluffy, life jigged to rag-time, and the feverish quest for unsatisfying pleasures.
She laid her head on her shoulder and winked, like a knowing little bird. She understood perfectly what the country was doing for her.
“In these clothes,” she asked, “and borrow the hired man’s tooth-brush? And leave my dear mother alone, and Fluffy to cry her poor little eyes out? And run the risk of what people would think when we both came creeping back? I guess I’d have to marry you then, Meester Deek. No, thanks.”
So at four o’clock, as the dusk was drawing a helmet of steel over the vagueness of the country, the sleigh was brought round. There were farewells and promises to come again; the twinkling of lanterns; the jingling of harness; the babies to be kissed; the quiet eyes of the mother who had found happiness; the atmosphere of sentiment which kindly people create for half-way lovers; then the last good-by, the steady trot of the horses, and the tinkling magic of sleigh-bells. Romance!
“You like babies, Meester Deek? If ever I were married, I’d like to have a baby-girl first. They’re so cuddly and dear to dress.”
He tucked the robe round her warmly and held it against her chin to keep the cold out. His free hand was clasped in hers. Then he let go her hand and slipped his arm about her, and found her hand waiting for him on the other side.
“Better and better,” she murmured contentedly, “and it isn’t the day we’d planned. I feel so safe with you, Meester Deek—far safer than I ought to if I loved you. You won’t say I led you on, will you? You won’t ever?”
“Never,” he promised.
“That’s what the sleigh-bells seem to say. ‘Never! Never! Never!’ as though they were telling us that this is the end.”
“To me they don’t say that.” His lips were against her cheek. “To me they say, ‘Forever. Forever. Forever.’”
The moon, gazing down on them, recognized him and smiled. The stars clapped their hands. Even the mountains, which had slept all day, uncrouched their knees and sat up in bed to look at them. Farmhouse windows, across the drifted whiteness, blinked wisely, speaking of home and children, and an end of journeys. Sometimes she drowsed with the swaying motion. Sometimes when he thought her drowsing, her eyes were wide.
“What are you thinking, dearest?”
“Isn’t dear enough?”
“Not now.”
“It ought to be—— What was I thinking? I was wondering: could a girl make a man whom she liked very much believe that she loved him? Would he find her out?”
“He’d find her out But liking’s almost loving sometimes.”
“I haven’t kissed you yet. I’ve only let you kiss me. Have you noticed?”
“Yes.”
“When I kiss you, Meester Deek, without your asking, you’ll know then.”
“Kiss me now.”
She shook her head. “It would be a lie.”
Once she said, “Shall we be horrid to each other one day like Horace and Fluffy?” And, when he drew her closer for answer, “I wonder why I let you do it. It’s so hard not to let you; you kiss so gently—I guess every girl loves to be loved.”
When they came to the station he had to wake her. In the train she slept. He scarcely removed his eyes from her. Behind the window he was aware of the shadowy breadth of river, the steep mountains, and the winking, swiftly vanishing lights of towns. It was a return from faery-land, with all the pain of returning. He wasn’t sure of her yet, and he had used all his arguments. Was it always like that? Did girls always say “No” at first? He feared lest in the flare and rush of the city he might lose her. He dreaded the casualness of their telephone engagements—the way she fitted him into the gaps between her pleasures. He wanted to be first in her life—more than that: to be dearer to her than her body, than her soul itself. The permission which she gave him to love her, without hope of reciprocity, was torturing. He would not own it to himself, but at the back of his mind he knew that it was not fair.
Once more they were fleeing up Fifth Avenue; night was polluted by the glare of lamps.
“It isn’t the same,” she whispered. “It’s somehow different.”
“We’ve seen something better and got our perspective.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she laughed. “New York has its uses.”
She sat up as they swung into Columbus Circle, and seemed to forget him. She was watching the hoardings for the announcements of October, seeing whether Janice Audrey’s name had been blotted out.
Already she was slipping from him. The silver wood—had it ever existed? If it had, had they ever walked there? It seemed a dream created by his ardent fancy, too kind and generous for reality.
He leant towards her; she drew away from him. “No more pilfering.”
“Our good times are always coming to an end,” he said sadly.
She smiled at his tone of melancholy. “And beginning; don’t forget that But I do wish it were last night.”
“You do! Then, you do wish it could last forever? Dear little D., if you chose, you could make it last.”
“Not forever. If anything lasted forever it would make me tired.—Hulloa, here we are.”
He helped her to alight The pavement had been swept; there was no excuse for carrying her.
“I live here,” she reminded him as he tried to touch her hand; “so let’s behave ourselves.”
She was settling back into the old rut of reticence, thinking again more of appearances than affection; even employing her old phrases to defend herself.
They stepped from the elevator and she slipped her key into the latch. He was trying to think of one final argument by which he might persuade her.
As the door pushed open, they halted; there was a sense of evil in the air. Desire clutched his arm for protection. They listened: panting; a chair falling; silence. Then the panting recommenced.
“Mother!”
The struggle stopped.
Teddy rushed across the hall to the front-room. He tried to keep Desire back. Vashti was stretched upon the couch, white as death, breathing hard, and exhausted. Her hair had broken loose and lay spread like a shawl across her breast. Mr. Dak was standing over her, his hands clenched. His collar was crumpled and had burst at the stud. His tie was drawn tight, as though it had been used to strangle him.
Desire threw herself down beside her mother, kissing her wildly and smoothing back her hair. “Oh, what is it? What is it, dearest? Tell me.”
She leant her face against her mother’s to catch the words. Springing to her feet, she glared at Mr. Dak.
“You low beast.” Her white virago fist shot up and struck him on the mouth. “You little swine. Get out.”
In the hall, as Teddy was seeing him off the premises, Mr. Dak commenced a mumbling defense. “What did she suppose I thought she meant? I wanted to marry her, but she wouldn’t. If she didn’t mean anything, what right had she to let me spend my money trotting her round?” From the dim-lit room came the terrible sound of sobbing. Desire met him on the threshold. “She’s only frightened. She wants you to help her to bed.”
Outside the bedroom door Vashti took his face between her hands. “Thank God, there are good men in the world.” He waited for Desire. All tenderness had become a trap. She nodded to him sullenly, “Good-night.” Then, flam-ing up, “Fluffy’s right. All men are beasts, I expect.”
The bedroom door shut. He switched off the lights and let himself out.
To a man who has never been in love the humble passion of his heart is to be allowed to love. He conjures visions of the woman who will call out his affection; he is always looking for her, seeing a face which seems the companion of his dreams, following, turning back disappointed and setting out afresh. When he does find her, his first feeling is one of overwhelming gratitude. His one idea is to give unstintingly, expecting nothing. He robes himself in a white unselfishness.
But the moment he has been allowed to love his attitude changes. He still wants to love, but he craves equally to be loved. He is no longer content to worship solitarily; he becomes sensitive to be worshiped in return. He is anxious to compete with the woman’s generosity. If she receives and does not give, he grows infidel like a devotee whose prayers God has not answered.
The right to clasp her without repulse, which the silver wood had granted him, had brought him to this second stage in his journey—the urgent longing to be loved. Then, like a coarse cynicism, discovering in all love’s loyalties an unsuspected foulness, had come the scene which he had witnessed in her presence. It had struck the barbaric note, stripping of conventional pretenses the motives which underlie all passion. It had revealed to him the direction of impulses which he himself possessed. Mr. Dak was no worse than any other man, if only the other man were tantalized sufficiently. Vashti had starved him too much and relied too much on his awe of her. She was a lion-tamer who had grown reckless through immunity; the beast had taken her unaware. Probably Mr. Dak was as surprised as herself.
Teddy understood now what Horace had meant by calling her “a slave of freedom.” All this gayety which he had envied, which had made him wish that he was more of a Sir Launcelot and less of a King Arthur—it was nothing but the excitement of skating over the treacherous thin ice of sex.
Mr. Dak was no worse than he might be if circumstances pushed him far enough. Desire had told him as much: “All men are beasts, I expect.”
He felt hot with shame. He sympathized with her virginal anger. He, too, felt besmirched. But her words rankled; they had destroyed their common faith in each other. Never again would he be able to approach her with his old simplicity. Never again would he hear her whisper, “I feel so safe with you, Meester Deek.” How could she feel safe with him? All men were beasts. She classed him with the lowest Any moment he might be swept out of caution into touching and caressing her. They would both remember the ugliness they had witnessed; she would flinch from him, and view him with suspicion. He would suspect himself. His very gentleness would seem to follow her panther-footed.
He returned to the Brevoort, but not to sleep. As he tossed restlessly in the darkness, he could hear her words of dismissal. She spoke them sorrowfully with disillusion; she spoke them mockingly; she spoke them angrily, clenching her white virago fists. It was she who ought to have said, “Thank God, there are good men.” Her mother had said that She had said, “All men are beasts, I expect” In the saying of it, she had seemed to attribute to his courting the disarming smugness of a Mr. Dak. The silver wood with its magnanimity counted for nothing. Whatever ideals he had built up for her were shattered by this haphazard brutality.
He shifted his head on the pillow. How did she look when she was tender and little? His last memory of her had blotted out all that. Rising wearily, he switched on the light and commenced a search for the tin-type photograph. At last he found it. Her features were undiscernible—faded into blackness.
Sleep refused to come to him. He dressed and sat himself by the window. How quiet it was! Night obliterates geography. The yards at the back of the hotel were merged into a garden—a garden like the one in Eden Row. He had only to half close his eyes to image it.
Eden Row set him remembering. The disgust with life that he was now feeling, had only one parallel in his experience—that, too, was concerned with her: the shock which her father’s confession had caused him on the train-journey back from Ware. “If you’re ever tempted to do wrong, remember me. If you’re ever tempted to get love the wrong way, be strong enough to do without it” And then, “I sinned once—a long while ago. I’m still paying for it You’re paying for it One day Desire may have to pay the biggest price of any of us.”
She was paying for it now when she could see no difference between his love and Mr. Dak’s—between honor and mere passion. “All men are beasts, I expect.” That was the conclusion at which she had arrived. She was incapable of high beliefs at twenty!
He recalled what the knowledge of Hal’s sin had done for him. Perhaps it had done the same for her. It had made him see sin everywhere; marriage itself had seemed impurity—all things had been polluted until into the dusk of the studio his mother had entered. He could hear himself whispering, “Things like that make a boy frightened, mother, when—when they’re first told to him.” It was after that that he had determined to make Desire in his life what the Holy Grail had been in Sir Galahad’s.
Would the consequences of this wrong, more than twenty years old, never end? Ever since he had begun to think, it had striven to uproot his idealism. Yet once, in the little moment of selfishness, it must have been ecstatic.
He had been thinking only of himself. In a great wave of compassion his thoughts swept back to her. She had had to live in the knowledge of this sin always. For her there had been no escape from it—no people like his mother and father to set her other standards of truer living. What was his penalty as compared with hers? What was the worth of his chivalry if it broke before the first shock of her injustice? He saw her again as a little girl, inquiring what it was like to have a father. There must have been a day in her waking womanhood when the knowledge that all children are not fatherless had dawned on her. Perhaps it had been explained to her coarsely by a servant or by the cruel ostracism of school-children. He could imagine the shame and tears that had followed, and then the hardening.
If she would only allow herself to understand what it was that he was offering! He longed to take her in his arms—not the way he had; but as he would cuddle a sick child against his breast to give it comfort. His compassion for her was almost womanly; it was something that he dared not tell her. Compassion from him was the emotion which she would most resent.
It was her pride that made her so poignantly tragic—her pose of being an enviable person. There was no getting behind it except by a brutal statement of facts. The scene which they had surprised in the apartment had staged those facts with ugly vividness. Despite the gayety with which she drugged herself, she must know that her mother’s position made her fair game for the world’s Mr. Daks. Her way of speaking of her as “my beautiful mother” was an acknowledgment, and sounded like a defense.
Her fear of losing her maiden liberty, her dread of the natural responsibilities of marriage, her eagerness to believe the worst of men, her light friendships, her vague, continually postponed ambitions—they were all part of the price she was paying. Her glory in her questionable enfranchisement was the worst part of her penalty; it made what was sad seem romantic, and kept her blind to the better things in the world. She did not want to be rescued from the dangers of her position. She ignored any sacrifice that he might be making and spoke only of the curtailments that love would bring to her. In putting forward her unattempted career as an obstacle, she did not recognize that his accomplished career was in jeopardy while she dallied.
Increasingly since he had landed in New York, his financial outlook had worried him. At the time of sailing he had had seven hundred pounds in the bank; then there were the three hundred pounds per annum from his Beauty Incorporated shares. This, in addition to what he could earn, had looked like affluence by Eden Row standards. But in the last few months he had been spending recklessly. The frenzy which held him prevented work. Commissions from magazines were still uncompleted. His American and English publishers were urging him to let them have a second manuscript. He assured them they should have it, but the manuscript was scarcely commenced. The dread weighed upon him like a nightmare that he had lost his creative faculty. His intellect was paralyzed; he had only one object in living—to win her.
And when he had won her, at the rate at which he was now going, marriage might be impossible. Already he had drawn on his English savings. After accustoming her to a false scale of expenditure, he could scarcely urge retrenchment It would seem to prove all her assertions of the dullness which overtakes a woman when she has placed herself absolutely in a man’s power. At this stage there was no chance of curtailing his generosity. So long as they were both in New York the endless round of theatres, taxis and restaurants must continue. He could not confess to her how it was draining his resources. It would seem like accusing her of avarice and himself of poverty. Poverty and the loss of beauty were the two calamities which filled her heart with the wildest panic.
Like a thunderstorm that had spent itself, the clamor of argument died down. It left him with a lucid quietness. Again she lay hushed in his embrace; her lips shuddered beneath his pressure. That moment of dearness, more than any ceremony of God or man, had bound him to her. It had made him sure of subtle shades of fineness in her character which she refused to reveal to him yet His love should outlast her wilfulness. He would wait for years, but he would win her. The day would come when she would awake to her need of him. Meanwhile he would make himself a habit—what the landscape was to the old man at Baveno—adding link upon link to her chain of memories, so that in every day when she looked back, there would be some kindness to remind her of him.
A thought occurred. He would put his chances to the test. He fetched a pack of cards from his trunk and drew up to the desk. Having shuffled them, he spread them out face-downwards. If he picked a heart, he would many her within the year. When he found with a thrill of dismay that it was a spade, he changed his bargain and agreed to give himself three chances. The next two were hearts. That encouraged him. He played on for hours in the silent room—played feverishly, as though his soul depended on it He craved for certainty. When luck ran against him, he made his test more lenient till the odds were in his favor. Whatever the cards said, he refused to take no for an answer. Morning found him with the lights still burning, his shoulders crouched forward, his head pillowed on his arms.
All that day he waited to hear from her. He could not bring himself to telephone her. After what had happened, delicacy kept him from intruding. In the afternoon he sent her flowers to provide her with an excuse for calling him up. She let the excuse pass unnoticed. Her strategic faculty for silence was again asserting itself. He lived over all the events of the previous day, marking them in sequence hour by hour, finding them doubly sweet in remembrance. The longest day of his life had ended by the time he crept to bed.
Next morning he searched his mail for a letter from her. There was nothing. He was sitting in his room trying to work—it was about lunch-time—when the telephone tinkled.
“Hulloa,” a voice said which he did not recognize, “are you Mr. Gurney, the great author?—Well, something terrible’s happened; you’ve not spoken to your girl for more than twenty-four hours. It’s killing her.” A laugh followed and the voice changed to one he knew. “Don’t you think I’m very gracious, after all your punishment?—Where am I?—No, try another guess. You’re not very psychic or you’d know. I’m within—let me count—forty seconds of you. I’m here, in a booth of the Brevoort, downstairs.—Eh! What’s that?—Will I stop to lunch with you? Why, of course. That’s what I’ve come for.”
It was extraordinary how his world brightened. The ache had gone out of it Finances, work, nothing mattered. The future withdrew its threat “I’m wearing my Nell Gwynn face,” she laughed as he took her hands. Then they stood together silent, careless of strangers passing, smiling into each other’s eyes.
“You silly Meester Deek,” she whispered, “why did you keep away if you wanted me so badly?”
“Because——” and there he ended. He couldn’t speak to her of the ugliness they had seen together; she looked so girlish and innocent and fresh. It was hateful that they should share such a memory.
“I’m not proud when I’ve done wrong,” she said. Her eyes winked and twinkled beneath their lashes. “And it’s rather fun to have to ask forgiveness when you know you’ve been forgiven beforehand.”
He led her into the white room with its many mirrors. Quickly forestalling the waiter, he helped her off with her furs and jacket. She glanced up at him as he did it. “Rather mean of you to do the poor man out of that It’s about the nearest a waiter ever comes to romance.”
When he had taken his seat opposite to her, she questioned him, “Why did you act so queerly?”
“Queerly!”
“You know. After the night before last?”
He wished she would let him forget it “I thought you might not want me.”
“Want you!” She reached across the table and touched his hand. “You do think unkind thoughts. If I did say something cruel, it wasn’t meant—not in my heart I’m afraid you think I’m fickle.”
He delayed her hand as she was withdrawing it “If I did, I shouldn’t love you the way I do, Princess.”
A waiter intruded to take their order. It seemed to Teddy that ever since Long Beach, waiters had been clearing away his tenderest passages as though it were as much a part of their duties as to change the courses.
When they were left alone, she brought matters to a head. “I suppose you got that strange notion because—because of what I said. Poor King! He did make me angry, and yesterday he came to us so penitent and sorry. We had to forgive him.—You’re looking as though you thought we oughtn’t But it doesn’t do to be harsh. We all slip up sooner or later, and the day’s always coming when we’ll have to ask forgiveness ourselves.”
He stared at her in undisguised amazement Was this merely carelessness or a charity so divine that it knew no bounds?
“Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” she continued; “you’re thinking we’re lax. That’s what people thought about Jesus when he talked to the woman of Samaria. Mr. Dak’s quite a good little man, if he did make a mistake. He’s always been understanding until this happened.”
She described as a mistake something that had appealed to him as tragedy. Had her innocence prevented her from guessing the truth? Perhaps it was he who was distorting facts.
“You seem to be accusing me of self-righteousness when you speak of other people being understanding. I’m not self-righteous—really I’m not, Desire—I do wish you’d believe that. Can’t you see why I’m not so lenient as some of your friends? It’s because I’m so anxious to protect you. If people are too lenient, it’s usually because they don’t want to be criticized themselves. But when a man’s in love with a girl, he doesn’t like to see her doing things that he might encourage her to do if he didn’t respect her and if they were only out for a good time together.”
She had frowned while he was speaking. When he ended, she lifted her gray eyes. “I do understand. I think I understand much more than you’ve said. But please don’t judge me—that’s what I’m afraid of. I know I’m all wrong—wrong and stupid in so many directions.—I’ve only found out how wrong,” her voice dropped, “since I’ve known you.” He felt like weeping. He had judged her; in spite of his resolutions to let his love be blind, he had been judging her. Every time he had judged her, her intuition had warned her. And there she sat abasing herself that she might treat him with kindness.
He became passionate in her defense. “You’re not wrong. I wouldn’t have anything, not a single thing in your life altered—nothing, Desire, from—from the very first. You’re the dearest, sweetest——”
She pressed a finger to her lips and pointed to the mirror. He caught sight of his strained expression, and remembered they were in public.
While he recovered himself, she did the talking. “I’m not the dearest, sweetest anything; you don’t see straight. Some day you’ll put on your spectacles. You’ll see too much that’s bad then. That’s what Horace has done.—He sailed for England this morning.”
“What’s that? D’you mean he’s broken with——”
She nodded. “Too bad, isn’t it? She didn’t much want him to come to America, but she’s fearfully cut up now he’s left She was counting on having such good times with him at Christmas. He didn’t explain anything; he just went. And——” She made a pyramid of her hands over which she watched him. “D’you know, she owns up now that some day she might have married him.”
“But she never told him?”
Desire looked away. “A girl never tells a man that till the last moment. He got huffy because she was cross with him for taking her to the country. He didn’t know that when a woman dares to be angry with a man, it’s quite often a sign that she’s in love with him.”
“Is it?” He asked the question eagerly. Desire had been cross; this might be the key to her conduct.
She caught his meaning and smiled mysteriously. “Yes—quite often.” Then, speaking slowly, “I guess most misunderstandings happen between men and women because they’re not honest with each other.”
The tension broke. “Fancy calling you a man and me a woman,” she laughed. She bent forward across the table. “We both ought to be spanked—you most especially.”
“Why me especially?”
“A little boy like you coming to a little girl like me and pretending to speak seriously of marriage.—But let’s be honest with each other always. Do you promise?”
“I promise.”
“Then, I’ll tell you something. I think it’s splendid of you to go on loving me when you know that I’m not loving you in return.”
“And I think it’s splendid of you to let me go on loving.”
“But do I?” She eyed him mockingly. Then, with one of those sudden changes to wistfulness, “What Horace has done has made me frightened. I’m afraid—and I’m only telling you because we’ve promised to be honest—I’m so afraid that you’ll leave me, and that then I may begin to care. But you’d never be unkind like that, would you?” His hand stole out and met hers in denial. They kept on assuring each other that, whatever had befallen other people’s happiness, theirs was unassailable.
They had dawdled through lunch. When at last they rose the room was nearly empty.
“What next?”
She clapped her hands. “I know. Make this day different from all the others. Let’s pretend.”
“Pretend what?”
“You’ll see.”
On the Avenue they hailed a hansom and drove the long length of New York, through the Park to the Eighties on the West Side. Then she told him: they were to examine apartments, pretending they wanted to rent one. Wherever they saw a sign up they stopped the cabby and went in to make inquiries. Sometimes she talked Cockney. Sometimes she was a little French girl, who had to have everything that the janitor said translated to her by Teddy. She only once broke down—when the janitor, as ill-luck would have it, was a Frenchman; then they beat an ignominious retreat, laughing and covered with confusion.
It was a very jolly game to play with a girl you loved—this pretending that you were seeking a nest. It was all the jollier because she would not own that that was the underlying excitement of their pretense. As they passed from room to room, and when no one was looking, he would slip his arm about her and kiss her unwilling cheek. “Wait till we’re in the hansom,” she would whisper. “Oh, Meester Deek, you do embarrass me.”
Try as he would, he could not disguise the fact that he was in love with her. A light shone in his eyes. This seemed no game, but a natural preliminary to something that must happen. She was indignant when the custodians of the apartments took it for granted that they were an engaged couple. She ungloved her hand that they might see for themselves that the ring was lacking. “It’s for my mother,” she explained. “Yes, I like the apartment; but I can’t decide till my mother has seen it” She referred to Teddy pointedly as “My friend.” The janitors looked knowing. They smiled sentimentally and put her conduct down to extreme bashfulness.
That afternoon was a sample of many that followed. In ingenious and unacknowledged ways they were continually playing this game that they were married. Frequently it commenced with his presumption that she shared his purse, and that it was his right to give her presents. If a dress in a window caught her fancy, he would say, “How’d you like me to buy you that?”
“But you can’t. It isn’t done in the best families.”
“But I could if I were your husband.”
“If! Ah, yes!”
Then, for the fun of it, she would enter and try on the dress. Once he surprised her. She had fitted on a green tweed suit-far more girlish than anything that she usually wore-and the shop-woman was appealing to him for his approval. When Desire wasn’t looking, he nodded and paid for it in cash.
“Very pretty,” Desire said, not knowing it had been purchased, “but a little too expensive. Thank you for your trouble.”
At dinner, long after the store had closed, he told her.
“But I can’t accept things from you like that. It’s very sweet of you, but the suit’ll go back to-morrow. Even if I were willing, mother wouldn’t allow it.”
But Vashti only smiled. She was giving him his chance. It pleased her to regard them as children.
“Of course it isn’t the thing to do, but if it gives Teddy pleasure——”
So when the suit came home it was not returned. When she met him in the day time she invariably wore it He knew that her motive was to make him happy. The little tweed suit gave him an absurd sense of warmth about the heart whenever he thought of it. It was another bond between them.
“I wonder whether my fattier was at all like you—whether he was always buying things for my beautiful mother. It is strange to have a father and to know so little of him. You’re the only person, Meester Deek, I ever talk to about him. That’s a compliment. D’you think——” she hesitated, “don’t you think some day you and I might bring them together?”
It became one of the secret dreams they shared. He told her about the letter he had written to Hal and never sent.
“Don’t you ever mention me to your father and mother?”
It was an awkward question.
“You don’t Why not?”
He wasn’t sure why he didn’t He hadn’t dared to admit to himself why he didn’t. His world was out of focus. He supposed that every man’s world grew out of focus when he fell in love. But the supposition wasn’t quite satisfying; his conscience often gave him trouble.
“But why not?” she persisted. “Are you ashamed of me?”
“Ashamed of you!” he laughed desperately. “What is there to tell? If we were engaged———- But so long as we’re not, they wouldn’t understand. I’m waiting till I can tell them that.”
“I wish they knew,” she pouted. “I wish it wasn’t my fault that you were stopping in America. I wish so many things. I wouldn’t do a thing to prevent you if you wanted to sail to-morrow. You won’t ever blame me, will you?”
It always came back to that, her fear that he might accuse her of having led him on.
One day he made a discovery. He had gone to the apartment to call for her earlier than he was expected. She was out Lying on the table under some needle-work was a book which he recognized. He picked it up; it was the copy of Life Till Twenty-One which he had bought for her after the ride from Glastonbury, the receipt of which she had never acknowledged. He had invented all manner of reasons for her silence: that she was annoyed with him for having written about her; that she didn’t take him seriously as an artist. On opening it he found that not only had it been read, but carefully annotated throughout. The passages which referred most explicitly to herself were underscored. Against his more visionary flights she had set query marks. They winked at him humorously up and down the margins. They were like her voice, counseling with laughing petulance, “Now, do be sensible.”
She came in with her arms full of parcels. He held the book up triumphantly. “I’m awfully-proud. You are a queer kiddy. Why didn’t you tell me? I thought you didn’t care.”
Her parcels scattered. She grabbed the book from him. “That’s cheating.” She flushed scarlet. “Of course I care. What girl wouldn’t? But if I feel a thing deeply I don’t gush. I’m like that.”
“But you talk about Fluffy’s work; you’re always diving through crowds to see if her picture isn’t on news-stands. You tell me what your friend, Tom, is doing and—and heaps of people.”
“They’re different.”
“How?”
“If you don’t know, I can’t tel! you.”
“But I’m so proud of you, Princess. I do wish that sometimes,” he tried to take her hand—she fortressed herself behind a chair, “that sometimes you’d show that you were a little proud of me.”
“Oh, you!” She bit her finger the way she did when she suspected that he was going to try to kiss her mouth. Her eyes danced and mocked him above her hand. “Fancy poor little you wanting some one to be proud of you. Meester Deek, that does sound soft.”
“Does it?” His voice trembled. “I don’t mind how foolish I am before you. But I do wish sometimes that you’d treat me as though I wasn’t different. You’ve only called me twice by my name. You won’t dance with me, though I learnt especially for you. You won’t do all kinds of ordinary things that you’re willing to do with people who don’t count.”
All the while that he had been speaking she had smiled at him, her finger still childishly in her mouth. When he had ended, she came from behind her chair and threw herself on the couch. “I have piped unto you and ye have not danced. Is that it, Meester Deek? So now you’re weeping to see if I won’t mourn. I’m afraid I’m not the mourning sort; life’s too happy.—But I’m not nice to you. Come and sit down. I’m afraid I’m least gracious to the people I like best. Ask mother; she’ll tell you.”
Just as he was about to accept her invitation, Twinkles entered, her tail erect, and hopping on the couch, planted herself between them. She had the prim air of a dog who is the custodian of her mistress’s morals.
Desire began to toy with the silky ears. “My little chaperone knows what’s best for me, I guess.—Meester Deek doesn’t love ’oo, Twinkles. He thinks ’oo’s a very interfering little doggie.”
He did. Despite his best efforts Twinkles growled at him and refused to be friends. She was continually making his emotion ridiculous. She timed her absurdly sedate entrances for the moments when the cloud of his pent-up feelings was about to burst.
“Love’s Labor Lost or Divided by a Dog.” Desire glanced, through her lashes laughingly. “You could write a play on it Twinkles and I could take the leading parts without rehearsing.”
After his discovery that she had read his book he began to try to interest her in his work—his contemplated work which was scarcely commenced while she kept him waiting. She seemed pleased when he placed his manuscripts in her lap. She loved to play the part of his severest critic, sweeping tempestuously aside all ideas that she pronounced unworthy of him.
The only side of his career in which she failed to show interest was the financial. The mere mention of money made her shrivel up. He had hoped that if he could persuade her to talk about it, he might be able to confess his straitened circumstances. He guessed the reason for her delicacy and respected it: concern on her part over his bank-account might make her look grasping. After each vain attempt to broach the subject, he would dodge back to cover as if he hadn’t meant it, and would commence to tell her hurriedly of his dreams of fame. While he did it, a comic little smile would keep tugging at the corners of her mouth.
“I don’t think you’re wasting time with me,” she said.
“I know I’m not.”
“But I meant something different. I meant that you’re learning about life; I’m making awfully good copy for you. One day, when I’m a famous actress and you’re married to some nice little woman who’s jealous of me, you’ll write a book—a most heart-rending book—that’ll make her still more jealous. It’ll be a kind of sequel to Life Till Twenty-one, I guess. All experience, however much it costs, is valuable.—You’re laughing at me. But isn’t it?”
“You wise little person.”
“Just common-sense—and not so terribly little, either,” she corrected.
Many of these conversations took place towards midnight, after he had seen her home from dinners or theatres. Usually they were carried on in whispers so as not to waken Vashti, who left her bedroom door ajar when she knew that Desire was to be late in returning. As a rule, Desire was in evening-dress; he was sensitively conscious of her mist of hair, and of the long sweet slope of her white arms and shoulders. After taking Twinkles for a final outing, he always accompanied her up to the apartment Once she had had to press him to do so; now she often pretended that she had expected him to say good-night in the public foyer.
Saying good-night was a lengthy process, packed with the day’s omitted tendernesses and made poignant by a touch of dread. After he had risen reluctantly from the couch, they would linger in the hall, lasting out the seconds. There were few words uttered. When a man has said, “I love you,” many times, there is no room for further eloquence. She would stand with her back against the wall, eyeing him luringly and a little compassionately. Presently her hand would creep up to the latch and he would seize the opportunity to slip his arm about her. Wouldn’t she appoint a place of meeting for to-morrow? She would shake her head and whisper evasively, “Phone me in the morning.”
Gazing at each other in quivering excitement, they would droop nearer together. She knew that soon he would draw her to his breast. At the first movement on his part she would turn the latch and her free hand would fly up to shield her mouth. He would attempt to coax it away with kisses.
“I’ve only kissed your lips once. And you’ve never kissed me yet. Won’t you kiss me, Desire?”
The tenacious little hand would remain obdurate. “Meester Deek, you mustn’t. The door’s open. If anybody saw us——”
If he tried to pull it away, she would call softly so that nobody could hear her, “Help, Meester Deek is kissing me.” If he went on trying, she would gradually call louder.
By degrees she would get him to the elevator; but unless she rang the bell, he preferred to descend by the stairs for the joy of seeing her leaning over the rail and raining down kisses to him. The further he descended the more willing she seemed to be accessible. If he turned to go back to her, her face would vanish and he would hear her door shutting.
These farewells embodied for him the ghostly acme of romance. They were the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet enacted on the stairway of a New York apartment-house. From such frail materials till the new day brought promise, he constructed the palace of his hopes and ecstasies. It was the ghost of happiness that he had found; happiness itself escaped him. He longed for her to love him.
Was she incapable of passion—she who could rouse it to the danger-mark in others? He suspected that he was too gentle with her; but forcefulness brought memories of Mr. Dak. Though she made herself the dearest of companions, he knew that her feeling was no more than intense liking. He had failed to stir her.
Sometimes he thought that out of cowardice she was wilfully preventing herself from loving; sometimes that she was diverting the main stream of her affection in a wrong direction. She could still court separation from him without regret Fluffy had only to raise her finger and all his plans were scattered. Fluffy raised her finger very often now that Horace had left.
He despised himself for feeling jealous of a woman; but he was jealous. Fluffy knew that she was his rival. When they were all three together, she would amuse herself with half-sincere attempts to help him in his battle: “He looks at you so nicely. Why don’t you marry him?” But she robbed him remorselessly of Desire whenever it pleased her fancy. “Oh, these men!” she would sigh, shrugging her pretty shoulders. “Don’t you know, little Desire, that it does them good to keep them guessing?”
While the days slipped by unnumbered, he tried to persuade himself that Desire’s difficulty of winning made her the more worthy of his worship. He often thought of his father’s picture, buried beneath dusty canvasses in the stable at Eden Row. It was like that. He had stumbled into a Garden Enclosed, basking in lethargy, where Love peered in through the locked gate, and all things waited and slumbered. Then came the awakening, shattering in its earnestness.
It was three days before Christmas. The weather had turned to a sparkling coldness. Tall buildings looked like Niagaras of stone, poured from the glistening blueness of the heavens. In Madison Square and Columbus Circle Christmas trees had been set up. New York had a festive atmosphere—almost an atmosphere of childhood. Schools had broken up; streets were animated with laughing faces. Mistletoe and holly were in evidence. At frequent corners a Santa Claus was standing, white-bearded and red-coated, clattering his bell. Broadway and Fifth Avenue were thronged with matin茅e-girls and their escorts. They sprang up like flowers, tripping along gayly, snuggling their cheeks against their furs. Stores were Aladdin’s Caves, where money could make dreams come true. The spendthrift good-nature of the crowds was infectious.
All afternoon he had been shopping with her. “Our first Christmas together,” he kept saying. He invented plan after plan for making the season memorable. “When we’re old married people,” he told her, “we’ll look back. It’ll be something to talk about.”
“Only you mustn’t talk about it before your wife,” she warned him slyly.
“Why not?”
“She won’t like it, naturally. A Joan likes to think she was her Darby’s first and only.”
He drew her arm closer into his, and peeped beneath the brim of her hat, “Well, and wasn’t she?”
“Old stupid.”
Over his cheerfulness, though he tried to dispel it, hung a mist of melancholy. He was reminded of all the Christmases which his father and mother had helped to make glad. If this was the first he had spent with Desire, it was the first he had been absent from them. They would be lonely. His gain in happiness was in proportion to their loss. He felt guilty; it came home to him at every turn that his treatment of them had not been handsome.
Suddenly she bubbled into laughter. “You do look tragic Cheer up.” Perching her chin on her clasped hands, she leant towards him, “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“But there is. Is it anything that I’ve said or done? I’m quite willing to apologize. Tell me.” Her voice sank from high spirits till it nearly trembled into tears. “You promised always to be honest” Her hand stole out and caressed his fingers. “Our first Christmas together! Mee-ster Deek, you’re not going to make it sad after—after all our good times together?”
“I’m not making it sad.” He spoke harshly. His tone startled her. She stared at him, puzzled. For the first time he had failed to be long-suffering.
“Perhaps we’d better be going.”
Assuming an air of dignity, she slipped into her jacket and commenced to gather up her furs. Usually they enacted a comedy in which he hurried to her assistance and she made haste to forestall him. Instead, he beckoned for the bill.
“Perhaps we had,” he said shortly.
When the waiter had gone for the change, he began to relent. Fumbling in his breast-pocket, he pulled out the case and placed it on the table.
“I got this for you, not because it cost money, but because I thought you’d like it.”
She did not touch it. “Three days till Christmas. It isn’t time for presents yet.”
“Will you promise to accept it?”
“Why shouldn’t I? It’s a little brooch or somethings isn’t it? Let’s wait till Christmas Eve, anyway—till the day after to-morrow.”
“I want you to see it now.”
The waiter came back with the change. He picked it up without counting it, keeping his eyes on hers. She was fingering the case with increasing curiosity.
“But why now?”
“Because——-” He couldn’t explain to her.
Her face cleared and broke into graciousness. “You are funny. Well, if it means so much to you——” She examined the case first. “Tiffany’s! So that’s what you were doing when you left me—busting yourself? Shall I take just one peek at it?—Give me a smile then to show that we’re still friends—— All right—to please you.”
He twisted on his chair and gazed into the room. The moment while he waited was an agony. He was a prisoner waiting for the jury to give its verdict. All his future hung upon her words.
She gasped. “What a darling! Diamonds! Are they diamonds? They must be since they’re Tiffany’s. But it must have cost—-”
He swung round. Her glance fell. “I can’t take it.”
“You can. You’re going to. Here, let’s try it on—There!”
She fidgeted it round, watching the stones sparkle. She seemed fascinated, and wavered. Then she gathered her will-power: “No, Meester Deek. What kind of a girl d’you think I am?”
She tried to remove it; he stayed her. They sat in silence. It was very much as though they had quarreled—the queerest way to give and receive a present.
He picked up the empty case and slipped it in his pocket “I’ll carry it for you. What’ll we do next? A theatre?”
She glanced down at her green tweed suit. “Not dressy enough. Besides,” she consulted the watch on her wrist, “it’s nine.—Oh, I know; let’s visit Fluffy. We’ll catch her between the acts.”
Fluffy was leading lady in Who Killed Cock Robin? which was playing to crowded houses at The Belshazzar.
At the corner of Forty-second Street and Times Square he held her elbow gingerly to guide her through the traffic; on the further pavement he released it They walked separately. Then something happened which marked an epoch in their relations. Shyly she took his arm; previously it was he who had taken hers. She hugged it to her so that their shoulders came together. “Can’t you guess why I wanted to see Fluffy? I’m dying to show it to her.” Then, in a shamefaced little whisper: “Don’t think I’m ungrateful, Meester Deek. I never could say thanks. People—people who really like me understand.”
They came to The Belshazzar with its blazing sign, branding Janice Audrey on the night in fiery letters. There was something rather magnificent about marching in at the stage-entrance unchallenged. As they turned into the narrow passage which ran up beside the theatre, passers-by would halt to watch them, thinking they had discovered a resemblance in their faces to persons well known in stage-land. Even Teddy felt the thrill of it, though he was loth to own it, for these peeps behind the scenes cost him dearly; they invariably rekindled Desire’s ambitions to be an actress. She would talk of nothing else till midnight. The chances were that the rest of his evening would be spoilt; that was what usually happened if he allowed himself to be coaxed into the lady-peacock’s dressing-room. If the lady herself was before the footlights, he would have to hear Desire talking theatrical shop with her dresser. If she was present, he would have to sit ignored, listening to her accepting the grossest flatteries, till he seemed to himself to have become conspicuous by not joining in the chorus of adoration. In the seductive insincerity of that little nest, with its striped yellow wall-paper, its dressing-table littered with grease-paints, its frothy display of strewn attire, its perfumed atmosphere and its professional acceptance of the feminine form as a fact, he had spent many an unamiable hour.
As they passed the door-keeper, Desire smiled proudly. “We’re visiting Miss Audrey.” The man peered above his paper, recognized her and nodded. She glanced up at Teddy merrily, “Just as if we were members of the company.”
Breaking from him, she ran ahead up the stairs: “You wait here. I’ll let you know if it’s all right.”
In his mind’s eye he followed her. He imagined her flitting along the passage from which the dressing-rooms led off, on whose doors were pinned the names of their temporary occupants. He imagined the faded photographs of forgotten stars, gazing mournfully down on her youth from the walls. At the far end she would pause and tap, listening like an alert little bird for the answer. Then the door would open, and she would vanish. She was showing Fluffy her watch-bracelet now; they were vying with each other in their excited exclamations. He could picture it all.
It seemed to him that she had kept him waiting a long while—a longer time than usual. It might be only his impatience; time always hung heavy without her. Men passed—men who belonged to the management. They looked worried and evidently resented his presence. He returned their resentment, feeling that they were mistaking him for a stage Johnny.
At last he determined to wait no longer. As he climbed the stairs, he heard the muttering of voices and some one sobbing. All the doors of the dressing-rooms were open. The passage was crowded. The entire cast was there in their stage attire. Managers of various sorts were pushing their way back and forth. A newspaper man was being hustled out. Something might have happened to Desire. The disturbance was in Fluffy’s dressing-room. He elbowed his way to the front and peered breathlessly across the threshold.
Stretched on a couch was a slim boyish figure, in the costume of a Tyrolese huntsman. Her face was buried in her hands, her feet twitched one against the other and her shoulders shook with an agony of crying. The cap which she had been wearing had been tom off and hurled into a far corner. Her hair fell in a shining tide and gleamed in a golden pool upon the carpet. By the side of the couch her dresser stood, wringing her hands and imploring: “Now, Miss Audrey, this’ll never do. They’ve sent for Mr. Freelevy. You must pull yourself together. The curtain’s waiting to go up. It’ll be your call in a second.”
“Oh, go away—go away, all of you,” Fluffy wept “I don’t care what happens now. Nothing matters.”
Desire was kneeling beside her with her arms about her. She was crying too, dipping her lips into the golden hair. “Don’t, darling. You’re breaking my heart. Tell me. It may help.”
Simon Freelevy shouldered his way into the room. He was a stout, short man with a bald, shiny head. His hurry had made him perspire; he was breathing heavily.
“What’s all this?” he asked angrily. “Tantrums or what?”
Fluffy sat up. She looked pitiful as a frightened child. The penciling beneath her blue eyes made them larger than ever. She fisted her hands against her mouth to silence her sobs.
The dresser answered. “A cable was waiting for her. She read it after the first act It took her by surprise, sir. It was to tell her that Mr. Overbridge had married.”
“Sensible fellow.” Simon Freelevy took one look at Fluffy. In the quiet that had attended his entrance the roar of the impatient theatre, clamoring for the curtain to rise, could be heard. “She can’t go on,” he said brusquely. “She’s no more good to-night. Where’s her understudy?—Oh, youl Good girl—you got ready. Get back into the wings all of you.”
He drove them out like a flock of sheep, slamming the door contemptuously behind him.
Desire turned to Teddy. “Fetch a taxi. I can’t leave her to-night We’ll take her home to my apartment.”
As they drove through Columbus Circle the Christmas tree was illuminated at the entrance to the Park. The happiness which it betokened provoked another shower of tears from Fluffy. “It was cruel of him,” she wept, “cruel of him. I always, always intended—— You know I did, little Desire.”
She was like a hurt child; there was no consoling her. Her only relief seemed to be derived from repeating her wrongs monotonously. She kept appealing to Desire to confirm her assertions of the injustice that had been done her. Desire gathered her into her arms and drew her head to her shoulder. “Don’t cry, darling. He wasn’t worthy of you. There are thousands more men in the world.”
As soon as they had reached the apartment Fluffy said: “Let me go to bed. I want to cry my heart out.” In the hall as she bade Teddy good-night, she gazed forlornly from him to Desire: “You two, you’re very happy. You don’t know how happy. No one ever does until—until It ends.”
He watched them down the passage. He supposed he ought to go now. Instead, he went into the front-room and seated himself. He couldn’t tear himself away. He was hungry for Desire. He hadn’t known that she could be so tender. He yearned for some great calamity to befall him, that he might see her kneeling at his side and might feel her arms about him.
Finality was in the air. Horace’s example had startled him into facing up to facts; perhaps it had done the same for her. He felt that this was the psychologic crisis to which all his courtship had been leading. She cared for him, or she wouldn’t have accepted his present. Knowing her as he did, the very ungraciousness of her acceptance was a proof to him of how much she cared. And now this new happening I It had darted swiftly across their insecurity as the shadow of nemesis approaching. To-night her lips must give him his answer. She had said: “When I kiss you, Meester Deek, without your asking, you’ll know then.” They could drag on no longer. It wasn’t honorable to her, to himself, to his parents—it wasn’t fair to any of them. Like a stave of music her words sang in his memory, “And we’re about the right height, aren’t we?”
Twinkles wandered in; seeing that he was alone and that her services were not required, she wandered out. He got up restlessly. To kill time, he examined the little piles of books and set them in order. He picked up a boudoir-cap that she was making, pressing it to his lips because her hands had touched it. He smiled fondly; even in her usefulness she was decorative. She made boudoir-caps when buttons needed sewing on her gloves.
Whatever he did, the eyes of Tom watched him from the photograph on the piano. He had been hoping for months that she would remove it The eyes watched him in malicious silence. She had told him that Tom was a sort of brother. He had never disputed it, but he knew that no man could play the brother for long with such a girl. He wondered if Tom had found her lips more accessible, and whether she had ever kissed him in return.
It was getting late. Not quite the evening he had expected! Very few of his evenings were.
At a sound he turned. She was standing in the doorway, a wrapper clutched about her, her hair hanging long as at Glastonbury, her bare feet peeping out from bedroom slippers. She looked half-child, half-elf.
“Oh, it’s you. I thought you’d gone—been gone for hours.”
“Gone! How could I go? We didn’t say good-night.” He lowered his voice, copying her whisper. Everything seemed to listen in the quietness, especially Tom’s photograph.
He approached her. If she would be only a tenth as tender to him as she had been to Fluffy! He was quivering like a leaf. The mystic wind that blew through him was so gentle that it could only be seen, not heard. It seemed to fill the room with flutterings. She shook her head, tossing her hair clear of her shoulders. He halted. Then he seized her hands. They struggled to free themselves.
“You’re eating my heart out, Desire. I’m good for nothing. You must say yes. If you don’t love me, you at least like me. You like me immensely, don’t you? The other will come later.” His voice trembled with the need of her; it was more like crying. He tried to draw her to him; she clutched her wrap more tightly, and dodged across the threshold.
Something in him broke. “Aren’t you going to kiss me?”
She closed her eyes in dreamy denial. “Never?”
“How can I tell?”
“Then let me kiss you. You’ve let me do it so often. You’ll at least do that And—and it’s so nearly Christmas.”
“You’ve kissed me so many, many times. I don’t know why I allow it.” Her voice sounded infinitely weary.
He let go her hand. His face became ashen. “This can’t go on forever.”
“Shish! You’ll wake Fluffy.” She pressed her finger to her lip. “I know. It can’t go on forever. Don’t let’s talk about it.”
He turned slowly, and picked up his coat and hat. “You and I can talk of that or nothing.”
As he approached the hall, she slipped after him into the passage. With his hand on the latch he looked back, “Then you won’t let me kiss you?”
Her expression quickened into a bewitching smile. “You silly Meester Deek!” She glanced down at her gauzy attire. “How can I? You wouldn’t have seen me this way if it hadn’t been for an accident. Besides,” with a drooping of her head, “I’m so fagged; I don’t feel like kissing to-night.”
“If you loved me,” he said vehemently, “you’d let me kiss you, anyhow. You wouldn’t mind. You’d be glad. Why, you and I, the way we’ve been together, we’re as good as married.”
“Not as bad as that,” she murmured drowsily.
He opened the door. At the last moment she ran forward, holding out her hand. “You’re angry. Poor Meester Deek! You’re splendid when you’re angry. Cheer up. There are all the to-morrows.”
He could have taken her in his arms then. He would have taken her cruelly, crushing her to him. He feared himself. He feared the quiet. He feared her, lest directly he relented, she would repulse him. She lifted her hand part way to his mouth. He arrested it; it was her lips for which he was hungry—to feel them shuddering again beneath his pressure before love died. He hurried from her.
At last he had stirred her. He had wounded her pride. Tears gushed to her eyes, deepening their grayness. She stood gazing after him, dumbly reproachful.
As he entered the Brevoort the clerk handed him a letter. He glanced at the writing; it was from his mother. He waited till he was in his room before he tore the envelope.
“Aren’t you ever coming home!” [he read], “It makes us feel so old, living without you. What is it that’s keeping you? Until now I’ve not liked to suggest it. But isn’t it a girl? It can’t be the right one, Teddy, or you wouldn’t hide the news from your mother. When it’s the right one a boy comes running to tell her; he knows it’ll make her glad. But you must know it wouldn’t make me glad—so come back to where we’re so proud of you. If you cable that you’re coming, we’ll postpone our Christmas so that you can share it.”
And then, in a paragraph:
“I’ve bad news to tell you. The Sheerugs have lost all their money. Madame Josephine died suddenly; Duke Nineveh has stolen everything and decamped with a chorus-girl. Beauty Incorporated is exposed and exploded. The papers say it was a swindle. This’ll affect you financially, poor old chap.”
He sat with his mother’s letter in his hand—the same kind of letter that years ago Mrs. Sheerug must have penned to Hal. If Hal had preserved them, there must be stacks of them stowed away in the garrets at Orchid Lodge. How selfish lovers were in the price they made others pay! What dearly purchased happiness!
And he was becoming like Hal. He resented the comparison; but he was. Fame and opportunity were knocking at his door. Instead of opening to them, he sat weakly waiting for a girl who didn’t seem to care. One day fame and opportunity would go away; when they were gone, he would have lost his only chance of making the girl respond. If he became great—really great—she might appreciate him.
For the first time in his dealings with Desire strategy suggested itself. Not until Fluffy had lost Horace had she discovered that she had a heart. If he were to leave Desire—— Fear gripped him lest, while he was gone, some one else might claim her. The loneliness of what he would have to face appalled him. It was a loneliness which she would share at least in part; the habits formed from having been loved, even though she had not loved in return, might lead her into another man’s arms.
And yet, strategy or no strategy, he would have to leave New York; he couldn’t keep up the pace. The three hundred pounds per annum which had come to him from Beauty Incorporated hadn’t been much; but, while it lasted, it had seemed certain. It had been something to fall back on. It had stood between him and poverty. His nerve was shaken. What if his vein of fancy should run dry?
His habits of industry were already lost. He would have to go into retreat to re-find them—go somewhere where people believed in him; then he might retrieve his confidence. The yearning to be mothered, which the strongest men feel at times, swept over him like a tide. He wanted to hear himself called Teddy, as though his name was not absurd or disgraceful—a name to be avoided with a nickname.
If he appealed to Desire one last time, would she understand—would she be kind to him as she had been to Fluffy? He wondered—and he doubted. If he told her of the loss of the three hundred pounds his trouble would sound paltry. It might sound to her as though he were asking her to restore to him the watch-bracelet. It was in her company that he had spent so riotously; she might think that he was accusing her of having been mercenary. She had never been that; she had given him far more in happiness than the means of happiness had cost But he couldn’t conceive of being in her company and refraining from extravagance. Her personality made recklessness contagious; it acted like strong wine, diminishing both the future and the past, till the present became of total importance.
There was a phrase in his mother’s letter which brought an unreasonable warmth to his heart: “Come back to where we feel so proud of you.” It was a long while since any one had felt proud of him. But how had she guessed that? He had poured out his admiration. He had been so selfless in his adoration that he had sometimes fancied that he had been despised for it. He had almost come to believe that there was an unpleasantness in his appearance or a taint in his character which the love-blind eyes of Eden Row had failed to discover. Desire seemed most conscious of it when he stood in the light. It was only in the dusk of cabs and taxis that she almost forgot it. Sometimes she seemed morbidly aware of this defect; then she would say in a weary little voice, “I don’t feel like kissing to-night.”
Humiliation was enervating his talent. He was losing faith in his own worth—the faith so necessary to an artist. Desire said that it was “soft” of him to want her to be proud of him. Perhaps it was. But if she ought not to be proud of him, who ought?
He would have been content with much less than her pride—if only, when others were present, she had not ignored him. Her friends unconsciously imitated her example. They passed him over and chattered about trifles. Their conversations were a shallow exchange of words in which, when every nerve in his body was emotionalized, it was impossible for him to take part. He showed continually at a disadvantage. They none of them had the curiosity to inquire why he was there or who he was. He felt that behind his back they must smile at Desire’s treatment of him.
It would be good to get back to people who frankly reciprocated his pride—to artist father with his lofty ideals, who went marching through life with all his bands playing, never halting for spurious success to overtake him. It would be good to get back, and yet——
She had worked herself into his blood. She was a disease for which she herself was the only cure. Without the hope of seeing her his future would lose its sight. Up till now the short nightly partings had been agonies, which called for many kisses to dull their pain. When absent from her, he had made haste to sleep, that oblivion might bridge the gulf of separation. To have to face interminable days which would bring no promise of her girlish presence, seemed worse than death. If he returned to England, what certainty would he have that they would ever meet again?
He stung himself into shame by remembering what weakness had done for Hal. Hal would form a link between them, when every other means of communication had failed.
The wildness of his panic abated. He urged himself to be strong. If he went on as he was going now, he would bankrupt his life. To-morrow he would plead with her.
If she still procrastinated, then the only way to draw her nearer would be to go from her. The horror of parting confronted him again. He closed his eyes to shut it out. He would decide nothing to-night.
Next morning he phoned her at the usual time. She was still sleeping; he left a request that she should call him. He waited till twelve. At last he grew impatient and phoned her again. He was told that she had gone out with Fluffy, leaving word that he would hear from her later. By three o’clock he had not heard. All day he had been kept at high tension on the listen. The cavalierness of her conduct roused his indignation. Her punishment was out of all proportion to his offense, especially after the way in which she had received the watch-bracelet A month ago he would have hurried out to send her a peace-offering of flowers. To-day he hurried out on a different errand.
Jumping on a bus, he rode up Fifth Avenue and alighted at The International Sleeping Car Company. Entering swiftly, for fear his resolution should forsake him, he booked a berth on the Mauretania, sailing on Christmas Eve, the next night. He hesitated as to whether he should send his mother a cable; he determined to postpone that final step. He had booked and canceled a berth before. He tried to believe that he was no more serious now than on that occasion. He was only proving to himself and to her his supreme earnestness. ‘If she gave him any encouragement, even though she didn’t definitely promise to marry him, he would postpone his sailing.
He wandered out into the streets. Floating like gold and silver tulips on the dusk, lights had sprung up. Crowds surged by merrily; all their talk was of Christmas. The look of Christmas was in their faces. Girls hung on the arms of men. Everywhere he saw lovers: they swayed along the pavement as though they were one; they snuggled in hansoms, sitting close together; they fled by in taxis, wraithlike in the darkness, fleeting as the emotion they expressed. He knew all their secrets, all their thoughts: how men’s hands groped into muffs to squeeze slender fingers; how the fingers lay quiet, pretending they were numb; how speech became incoherent, and faces drooped together. He listened to the lisp of footsteps—all going somewhere to sorrow or happiness. How many lovers would meet in New York to-night! He felt stunned. His heart ached intolerably.
In sheer aimlessness he strolled into the Waldorf and hovered by the pillar from which he had so often watched to see her come. To see her approaching now he would give a year of his life. She would be wearing her white-fox furs and the little tweed suit he had given her. The fur rubbed off on his sleeves; it told many tales.
His resolution was weakening every minute; soon it would be impossible to leave her—even to pretend he had thought of leaving her.
He must keep his mind occupied; must go to some place which held no associations. Sauntering along Thirty-fourth Street, he passed by the Beauty Parlor where she went, as she said, “to be glorified.” He passed the shop to which he had gone with her to buy the earliest of his more personal gifts, the dozen silk stockings. Foolish recollections, full of poignancy! He crossed Broadway beneath the crashing Elevated. Gimbel’s at least would leave him unreminded; she despised any store which was not on Fifth Avenue. He had drifted through several departments, when he was startled by a voice. He turned as though he had been struck. A salesman, demonstrating a gramophone, had chosen the record of Absent for the purpose. He stood tensely, listening to the tenor wail that came from the impersonal instrument:
“Thinking I see you—thinking I see you smile.”
It was the last straw. His pride was broken. What did it matter whether she cared? The terrible reality was his need of her. He made a dash for the nearest pay-station and rang her up.
A man answered. He wasn’t Mr. Dak. “Who? Mr. Gurney? Hold the line. I’ll call her.—— Little D., here’s your latest. Hurry!”
He heard Desire’s tripping footsteps in the passage and her reproving whisper to her companion, “You had no right to do that.” Then her clear voice, thrilling him even at that distance: “Hulloa, Bright Eyes! I’ve just this minute got home. Did you get my wire?—You didn’t! But you must have. I sent it after you left last night.—Humph! That’s what comes of staying at these cheap hotels. You’d better ask the clerk at the desk.—Oh, you’re not at the Brevoort. At Gimbel’s! What are you doing there? Buying me another watch-bracelet? Never mind, tell me presently.—No, I’m not going to tell you what was in the telegram.—What’s that?”
He had asked who was with her.
“Naturally I can’t answer,” she said; “not now—later. You understand why.—Of course you can come. Hurry! I’m dying to see you. By-by.”
He had been conscious, while she was speaking, that her conversation was framed quite as much for the other man’s mystification as for his own. There had been a tantalizing remoteness in her tones. But what man had the privilege to call her “Little D.”? He remembered now that, when he had done it, an annoyed look of remembrance had crept into her eyes.
Life had become worth living again. The madness was on him to spend, to be gay, to atone. On his way uptown he went into Maillard’s to buy her a box of her favorite caramels. He stopped at Thorley’s and purchased a corsage of orchids. He was allowing her to twist him round her little finger. He confessed it. But what did anything matter? He was going to her. Life had become radiantly happy. He no longer had to eye passing lovers with envy. He was of their company and glorified.
When he had pressed the button of the apartment, he was kept waiting—kept waiting so long that he rang twice. On the other side Twinkles was barking furiously; then he heard the soft swish of approaching garments. The door opened. Through the crack he could just make out her face.
“Don’t come in till I hide,” she warned him in a whisper. “Every one’s out, except me and Twinkles. I’m halfway through dressing.” She retreated, leaving the door ajar. When she had fled across the hall into the passage, she called to him, “You may enter.”
He closed the door and listened in the discreet silence. She was in her bedroom. She had made a great secret of her little nest. She had told him about the pictures on the walls, the Japanese garden in the window, and the queer things she saw from the window when she spied across the air-shaft on her neighbors. She had a child’s genius for disguising the commonplace with glamour. Of this the name she had given him, which was known to no one but her and himself, was an example. She made every hour that he had not shared with her bristle with mysteries by sly allusions to what had happened in it Her bedroom was a forbidden spot; she deigned to describe it to him and left his imagination to do the rest. In his lover’s craving to picture her in all her environments—to be in ignorance of nothing that concerned her—he had often begged her to let him peep across the threshold. She had invariably denied him, putting on her most shocked expression.
He walked into the front-room; it was littered with presents, received and to be given, and their torn wrappings.
She heard him. “You mustn’t go in there,” she called.
“Then where am I to go?”
“Bother. I don’t know. You can stand in the passage and talk to me if you like.”
For a quarter of an hour he leant against the wall, facing her closed door. While they exchanged remarks he judged her progress by sounds. Sometimes she informed him as to their meaning. “It’s my powder-box that I’m opening now.—What you heard then was the stopper of my Mary Garden bottle.—Shan’t be long. Why don’t you smoke?”
He didn’t want to smoke, but when she asked him a second time, her question had become an imperative.
Her voice reached him muffled; by the rustling she must be slipping on her skirt. “I’m keeping you an awfully long while, Meester Deek; you’re very patient.” There was a lengthy pause. Then: “Of course it isn’t done in the best families, but we’re different and, anyhow, nobody’ll know. I’ve drawn down the shades.—If you promise to be good, you can come inside.”
She was seated at her dressing-table before the mirror, adjusting her broad-brimmed velvet hat.
“Hulloa!” She did not turn, but let her reflection do the welcoming. “I haven’t allowed many gentlemen to come in here.” She seemed to be saying it lest he should think himself too highly flattered.
He bent across her shoulder, asking permission by his silence.
“You may take a nice Christmas kiss, if that’s what you’re after. Just one.”
He brushed her cool cheek, the unresponsive cheek of an obedient child. Her arms curved up to her head like the fine handles of a fragile vase. She proceeded quietly with the pinning of her hat. His arms went about her passionately. His action was unplanned. He was on his knees beside her, clutching her to him and kissing the hands which strove to push him from her. When his lips sought hers, she turned her face aside so that he could only reach the merest corner of her mouth. So she lay for some seconds, her face averted, till her motionlessness had quelled his emotion.
She laughed, freeing herself from his embrace. “Oh, Meester Deek,” she whispered softly, “and when I wasn’t wearing any corsets! Now let me go on with the pinning of my hat.”
He filled in the awkward silence by placing the corsage of orchids in her lap. Before she thanked him, she tried them at various angles against her breast, studying their effect in the mirror. Then she whispered reproachfully:
“Aren’t you extravagant? Money does burn holes in your pocket. You ought to give it to some one to take care of for you.”
There was no free chair. The room was strewn with odds and ends of clothing as though a cyclone had blown through it He seated himself on the edge of the white bed and glanced about him. On the dressing-table in a silver frame was a photograph of Tom. On the wall, in a line above the bed, were four more of him. Vaguely he began to guess why she had made such a secret of her bedroom, and why she had let him see it at this stage in his courtship. Jealousy smoldered like a sullen spark; it sprang into a flame which tortured and consumed him.
What right had this man to watch her? Why should she wish to have him watch?
He threw contempt on his jealousy. It made him feel brutal. But it had burnt long enough to harden his resolve.
She rose and picked up her jacket. “D’you want to help me?”
He took it from her without alacrity. As he guided her arms into the sleeves, she murmured: “Why were you so naughty last night, Meester Deek? You almost made me cross, I was so upset and tired. You weren’t kind.” Then, with a flickering uplifting of her lashes, “But I’m not tired any longer.”
She waited expectant. Nothing happened. She picked up a hand-mirror, surveying the back of her neck and giving her rebellious little curl a final pat, as though bidding it be careful of its manners. In laying it down she contrived to hold the glass so as to get a glimpse of his face across her shoulder. Her expression stiffened. As if he were not there, she swept over to the door, switched off the light and left him to follow.
He found her in the front-room. She had unwrapped a pot of azaleas and was clearing a space to set it on the table.
“Tom brought me this,” she explained in a preoccupied tone. “He was waiting for me when I got back. It was Tom who answered the phone when you called me. Kind of him to remember me, wasn’t it?”
“Very kind.”
“You don’t need to agree if you don’t really think so.” She spoke petulantly, with her back toward him. “Even a plant means a lot to some people. Tom’s only an actor. He’s not a rich author to whom money means nothing.”
“And I’m not.”
“Well, you act like it.”
She had found that the bottom of the pot was wet and walked out of the room to fetch a plate before setting it on the table. While she was gone, he groped after the deep-down cause of her annoyance.
“Did you really send me a telegram?” he asked the moment she reentered.
“You’ve never caught me fibbing yet. I’ve been careful. Why d’you doubt it?”
“I thought you might have said it—well, just for something to say. Perhaps because you were embarrassed, or to make Tom jealous.”
“Embarrassed! Why embarrassed? Tom’s an old friend. I must say you have a high opinion of me. It strikes me Mrs. Theodore Gurney’s going to have a rough time.”
There was a dead silence. She pivoted slowly and captured both his hands. Dragging him to the couch, she made him sit beside her. In the sudden transition of her moods, her face had become as young and mischievous with smiles as before it had been elderly and cross.
“Well, Meester Deek, haven’t you anything to say? Don’t you like me better now?” She dived to within an inch of his face as though she were about to kiss him, and there stopped short, laughing into his eyes. When he made no response, she became tensely grave. “I can be a little cat sometimes, and yet you want to live with me all your life. I should think you’d get sick of me. I’m very honest to let you see what I really am.” She said this with a wise shake of her head and an air of self-congratulation. “But you’re a beast, too, when you’re offended.” She stooped and kissed his hand. “The first time I’ve ever done that,” she murmured, “to you or any man. Haven’t we gone far enough with our quarreling?”
“I think we have.”
“But you’ve not forgiven me?—Well, I’ll tell you, and then you’ll ask my pardon.” She moved away from him to the other end of the couch. “I’ve really been very sweet to you all the time and you haven’t known it. Last night we were both stupid; I was upset. I don’t know which of us was the worst. But after you’d gone I was sorry, and I dressed, and I went out all alone at midnight to send you a telegram so you’d know that I was sorry directly you woke in the morning. It wasn’t my fault that you didn’t get it. And then about to-day—you’re angry because I didn’t call you up. It was because I was looking after your Christmas present. And when you came here all glum and sulky I let you see my bedroom. And now I’ve kissed your hand. Isn’t that enough?”
She was turning all the tables on him. “Let’s be friends,” he said. When he slipped his arm about her, she flinched. “Mind my flowers. Don’t crush them. You must first say that you’re sorry.”
“I’m sorry. Terribly sorry.”
“All right, then. But you did hurt me last night when—when you went away like that.”
“But you often let me go away like that.”
She held up a finger. “You’re starting again.”
She rose and walked over to a pile of parcels which were lying on the piano. As he watched her, the thought of Tom came back. She hadn’t explained those photographs; his pride wouldn’t permit him to ask her.
“You’re not very curious, Meester Deek. Why d’you think I kept you waiting in the passage and wouldn’t let you come in here? I was afraid you might see something. I’ll let you see it now.”
She was leaning against the piano. He went and stood beside her. She moved nearer so that her hair swept his cheek like a caress. “Do you like it?” She placed a miniature of herself done on ivory in his hand. “Better than the poor little tin-type portrait that faded!”
“For me?” he asked incredulously.
“Who else? No, listen before you thank me. I thought they’d never get it done. They’ve been weeks over it. All day I’ve been hurrying them. Now, won’t you own that you have been misunderstanding?”
“I’ve been an unjust idiot.”
“Not so bad as that. And I’m not so bad, either, if you only knew—— Now I’ll put on your bracelet Did you notice that I wasn’t wearing it?”
“Why weren’t you?”
The babies came into her eyes. “You’ve had a narrow escape. If you hadn’t been nice, I was going to have given it back to you. Let’s fetch it. You can fasten it on for me.”
From the steps of the apartment-house they hailed a hansom, and drove through the winking night to the Claremont. “‘So, honey, jest play in your own backyard,” she sang. When she found that she couldn’t intimidate him, she started on another fragment, filling in the gaps with humming when she forgot the words:
“Oh, you beautiful girl,
What a beautiful girl you are!
You’ve made my dreams come true to me——”
“Sounds as though I were praising myself, doesn’t it? Don’t come so near, Meester Deek; every time you hug me you carry away so much of my little white foxes. ‘Beware of the foxes, the little foxes that spoil the something or other.’ Didn’t some one once say that? I wish you’d beware; soon there won’t be any fur left.”
While she went to the lady’s room to see whether her appearance had suffered under his kisses, he engaged a table in a corner, overlooking the Hudson.
Towards the end of the meal, when she was finishing an ice and he was lighting a cigar, a silence fell between them. She sat back with her eyes partly closed and her body relaxed. Up to that moment she had been daringly vivacious. He had learnt to fear her high spirits and fits of niceness. They came in gusts; they always had to be paid for with periods of languor.
“What are you thinking?” he asked. “Something sad, I’ll warrant.”
“Fluffy.” She glanced across at him, appealing for his patience.
“How is she?” He tried to humor her with a display of interest
“She’s broken up. She’s been speaking to Simon Freelevy. She absolutely refuses to go on playing in New York; it’s too full of memories. So it’s all arranged; she’s going to California in the New Year with a road-company.”
He understood her depression now. If Fluffy was leaving New York, this was his chance. Somehow or other he must manage to hang on. He was glad he had not sent that cable to his mother.
“That’s hard lines on you.” He sank his voice sympathetically. “You’ll miss her awfully.”
Desire woke up and became busy with what remained of her ice. “I shan’t. She wants me to go with her. It’ll do me good.” Then coaxingly, as though she were asking his permission, “I’ve never been to California.”
The heat drained from him. He paused, giving himself time to grow steady. If he counted for so little, she shouldn’t guess his bitter disappointment. “But will you leave your mother? I should think she’ll be frightfully lonely.”
“My beautiful mother’s so unselfish.”
“But——”
“Well?”
They gazed at each other. He wondered whether she was only playing with him—whether she had only said it that he might amuse her with a storm of protests.
“You were going to ask about yourself?” she suggested. “I’ve thought all that out. You and mother can come and join us somewhere. There’s splendid riding out West. I’ve always wanted to ride. It would be fine to go flying along together if—if you were there.”
He didn’t understand this girl, who could give him ivory miniatures one minute and propose to go away for months the next—who, while she refused to become anything to him, undertook to arrange his life.
He laughed tolerantly. “I’m afraid that can’t be. I shouldn’t accomplish much by tagging after a road-company all across a continent. You don’t seem to realize that I have a living to earn.”
“That was a nasty laugh,” she pouted; “I didn’t like it one little bit.”
She played with his fingers idly, lifting them up and letting them fall, like soldiers marking time. “You manicure them now. You’ve learnt something by coming to America—— Your living!” She smiled. “It seems to come easily enough. I hear you talk about it, but I never see you working.”
Here was the opening for which he had been waiting. “You’re right. I’ve hardly done a stroke since I landed. Winning you has taken all my time.”
“Has it?” She glanced round the room dreamily, making confidences impossible by her lack of enthusiasm.
He got up. “Shall we go back to the apartment? We can talk better there.”
She lounged to her feet. “If you’ll promise not to worry me. I’ve gone through too much to-day already.”
He knew the meaning of her fatigue; once more she was barricading herself. He was doubly sure of it when he saw her open her vanity-case and produce a veil. A veil was a means of protection which, above all others, he detested. “Don’t put that thing on.”
“I must. It’ll keep the wind off. I don’t like getting chapped.”
On the drive back she sat rigid with her hand before her eyes, as though she slept. It seemed to him that he had not advanced a pace since the ride to Long Beach; the only difference was that his arm encircled her. She paid so little heed to it that he withdrew it. She gave no sign that she noticed its withdrawal. It was only when they were halting that she came to herself with a drowsy yawn. Leaning against his shoulder for a second, she peered up at him with mock regret: “And to think that my head might have been resting there all the time!”
It was plain that she didn’t want him to come up. In the foyer she held out her hand. When he did not take it, she lowered her eyes: “I’m sorry. I thought you were going.”
After the elevator had left them, she stood outside the door and carefully removed her veil. It was a frank invitation to him to kiss her and say good-by. He did neither. She drew the palms of her hands across her eyes. “I ought to go to bed.—You are a sticker. Well, if you won’t go, just for a little while.”
She produced the key from her vanity-case. He took it from her and slipped it into the latch. Only Twinkles was at home. For Twinkles she mustered the energy for a display of fun-making. Romping with the dog revived her.
“Take the nice gentleman in there,” she said, “while mistress makes herself beautiful. Mistress can’t allow the same gentleman, however pleasant, to come into her bedroom twice.”
He didn’t feel flippant. He was quivering with earnestness. While he waited among the litter of presents and paper he tried to master his emotion. He knew that if he once got to touching and kissing her, he would go out of the door with matters as undecided as when he had entered.
She drifted into the room rubbing her hands. “Been putting scent on them,” she explained, holding out to him her smooth little palms. “Don’t they smell nice?”
He didn’t kiss them. He didn’t dare. She gave him a puzzled look of inquiry; then showed him her back and became absorbed in gathering up the scattered papers. When several minutes of silence had elapsed, she turned.
“I’m not going to quarrel with you, if that’s what you want You’d have been wise to have said good-night to me downstairs. If you’ve really got something on your mind, for Heaven’s sake get it off.”
“It’s difficult and you don’t help me.”
She tossed her head impatiently. “You make me tired. It isn’t a girl’s place to help.”
Seating herself on the floor, with her legs curled about her and her ankles peeping out from under her skirt, she began to wrap up presents. “Please be nice,” she implored him in a little voice, “because I really do like you. Sit down here beside me and put your finger on the knots, so that I can tie them.”
He sat down opposite to her. That wasn’t quite what she had intended. She made a mischievous face at him.
“It isn’t a question of being nice,” he said quietly; “it’s a question of being honest. I’ve booked my berth on the Mauretania for to-morrow night.”
She gave a scarcely perceptible start. When she spoke, it was without raising her eyes. “You did that once before. You can’t play the same trick twice.”
“It isn’t a trick this time.”
She eyed him cloudily, still persuaded that it was. “Are you saying that because of what I told you about going to California? I thought you were too big and splendid to return tit for tat.”
“It isn’t tit for tat I booked this afternoon, before I knew about California.”
She gave her shoulders a shrug of annoyance. “Well, you know your business best.”
“I don’t; that’s why I’m telling you. I’m not being unkind. My business may be yours.”
At last she took him seriously. “I don’t see how it can be; you’d better explain. But first tell me: are you trying to imitate Horace? Because if you are, it won’t work.”
“I’m not.”
“Then light me a cigarette and let’s be sensible.”
Seated on the floor in the dim-lit room, with the Christmas presents strewn around, he told her. The first part was the old story of how he had dreamt about her from a child.
“You know that’s true, Princess?”
“And I’ve dreamt about you,” she nodded. “You were my faery-story.”
“Then why——”
“You tell me first.”
So he told her: told her how she had pained him in England by her silence; told her what her words “Come to America” had implied; described to her the expectations with which he had set sail; the disappointment when on landing he had found that she was absent; and then the growing heartache that had come to him while she trifled with him. He spared her nothing. “And you act as if my loving bored you,” he said; “and yet, if I take you at your word, you’re petulant May I speak about money now? I know how you hate me to talk of it—— And you won’t misunderstand?”
She gave her silent consent.
“I can’t afford to live in New York any longer. Last night there was a letter waiting for me. It told me that my only certain source of income was lost. It told me a whole lot besides; they’re lonely and promise to postpone Christmas if I’ll cable them that I’m coming.”
“Have you cabled?”
He shook his head.
“You must. Your poor little mother,” she murmured.
“You’d love my mother,” he said eagerly, “and my father, too. The moment he clapped eyes on you he’d want to paint you.”
“Would he? And after I’d taken you from him?” She screwed up her mouth in denial and crushed out the stub of her cigarette against her heel. It seemed the symbol of things ended. “You were telling me about the letter. What else?”
“That’s all. But you see, I’ve got nothing now except what I earn. And when my mind’s distracted—— It’s—— You don’t mind my saying it, do you? It’s waiting for you that’s done it. My power seems gone. If only I were sure of you and that you’d be to me always as you are now, I’d be strong to do anything.”
She had been fidgeting with her bracelet. When he had ended, she commenced to slip it off. “And it was the day that you lost everything that you were most generous. And I didn’t thank you properly, like the little pig I am. Teddy, please don’t be offended, but I’d so much rather you——”
He pressed his lips against the slim wrist that she held out. “Please don’t. It would hurt me most awfully.”
“And it makes me feel guilty to keep it,” she pouted.
They sat holding hands, gazing at each other. In the silence, without the fever of caresses, he had come nearer to her than at any previous moment. They were two children who had experimented with things they did not understand, and were a little frightened at what had happened and a little glad.
“You called me Teddy just now,” he whispered. “It’s the third time.”
She smiled at him with a flicker of her old wickedness. “I didn’t intend to. It slipped out because—because I was so unhappy.”
“But you needn’t be unhappy. Neither of us need be unhappy. Everything’s in our own hands. I’d work for you, Desire. I’d become famous for you. We’d live life splendidly. The way we’ve been living is stupid and wasteful; it doesn’t lead anywhere. If you’d marry me and come back with me——”
“To-morrow?” she questioned. “Meester Deek, you didn’t go and book two berths? You weren’t as foolish as that?”
He sought her lips. She turned her face ever so slightly, as though apologizing for a necessary unkindness! His look of disappointment brought tears to her eyes. She stroked his cheek gently in atonement.
“You weren’t as foolish as that?”
He hung his head. “No, I wasn’t: I wish I had been, and I would be if you——”
She stared beyond him, watching pictures form and dissolve before her inward eyes.
“We could sail to-morrow,” he urged her; “or wait till after Christmas. I’d wait for you for years if you’d only say that some day—— Can’t we at least be engaged?”
“Don’t wait,” she whispered.
“But I shall wait always—always. I shall never love any one but you.”
“They all say that.”
A key grated in the latch. She didn’t snatch away her hand the way she would have done formerly. She sat motionless, courting discovery. They heard Vashti’s voice, bidding some man good-night. The door shut. Glancing in on them in passing, she pretended to be unaware of what was happening. “I’m going straight to bed. You don’t mind if I don’t stay to talk with you? I’m tired.”
The quiet settled down. Desire crept closer. They had been sitting facing. “I guess you’re badly hurt. You thought that all girls wanted to get married, and to have little babies and a kind man to take care of them.” When he tried to answer her, she placed her hand upon his mouth. He held it there with his own, as though it had been a flower.
“I’m glad we got mad,” she whispered; “it’s made us real. It’s nice to be real sometimes. But I don’t know what to say to you—what to do to you. I haven’t played fair. At first I thought you were like all the rest. I know I’m responsible.”
She snuggled up to him like a weary child. “I’m at the cross-roads.—Don’t kiss me—you put me out when you do that. Just put your arms about me so that I feel safe. I—I want to tell you.”
“Then tell me, Princess.”
“I’m two persons. There’s the me that I am now, and the other me that’s horrid.”
“I love them both.”
“You don’t. The me that’s horrid is a spiteful little cat, and I may become the horrid me at any moment Meester D猫ek, you’d have to marry us both. I’m not a restful person at the best. I can never say the kind things that I feel. Most of the time I ought to be whipped and shaken. I suppose if I fell really in love it might be different.”
“Then fall really in love.”
She seemed to ponder his advice. “My love’s such a feeble little trickle. Yours is so deep and wide; mine would be lost in it And yet I do like you. I speak to you the way I speak to no other man. I could go on speaking to you forever. If I’d seen as much of any other man, he’d have bored me long ago.”
“And isn’t that just saying that you do love me?”
“Perhaps.” Her head stirred against his shoulder. Then: “No. That’s only saying that you’ve not found fault with me and that you’ve let me be selfish. You need some one who’ll be to you what your mother has been to your father. I’ll hate her when you find her; but, oh, Meester Deek, there are heaps of better girls in the world. I can’t cook, can’t sew, can’t even be agreeable very often. I want to live, and make mistakes, and then experiment afresh.—Perhaps I don’t know what I want. I feel more than friendship for you, but much less than love, because if it were love, it would stop at nothing. Oh, I know, though you don’t think it. Perhaps one day, when I’m older and wiser, I’ll look back and regret to-night. But I’m not going to let you spoil your life.”
“You’d make it.”
“Spoil it.”
She released herself from him. He helped her to rise.
“I’ve at least been an education for your soul. Do say it. I haven’t done you nothing but harm, have I?”
His emotion choked him.
She came and leant her forehead against his shoulder. “Do say it. Have I?”
“You darling kiddy, you’ve been the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“I have my own little religion,” she whispered. “I shall say a prayer for you to-night.”
“Will you pray that one day you may be my wife?”
She was silent. They moved together as in a trance towards the door. He was remembering what she had said it would mean if she kissed him without his asking. He was hoping. She accompanied him to the head of the stairs. Suddenly his will-power gave way. “I’m not going. You don’t think I’m going after to-night? You’ve shown me so much that—— Desire, I can’t live without you.”
She took his face between her hands. “You must go. If you don’t, it’ll be all the same. You’ve told me things, too. I’m hindering your work. After what you’ve told me, I would refuse to see you if you stayed. Perhaps it’s only for a little while. I may marry you some day. Who knows? And I wouldn’t want your mother to hate me.”
They clung together in silence.
“We’ll write often?”
“Yes, often.”
“And to-morrow?”
“Phone me in the morning.”
He thought she had repeated the phrase from habit. “My last day,” he pleaded.
“Phone me in the morning,” she reiterated.
He had said good-by; she was waving to him across the rail. He was nearly out of sight. He turned and came bounding back.
“What is it? I can’t keep brave if you make me go through it twice.”
He caught her to him. “Give me your lips,” he panted.
She averted her face.
His arms fell from her. “I thought not,” he whispered brokenly.
He had begun to descend. At the last moment she stooped. Her lips fluttered against his own; they neither kissed nor returned his pressure. She fled from him trembling across the threshold. The door shut with a bang. He waited to see her come stealing out. He was left alone with her memory.
On returning to the Brevoort he inquired for her telegram. At first he was told that none had arrived. He insisted. After a search it was discovered tucked away in the wrong pigeon-hole. Paying no heed to the clerk’s apologies, he slit the envelope and read:
“Forgive me. I’m sorry. Desire”
If only he had received it earlier! If only it had been brought to his bedside in the morning, what a difference it would have made! She would never have known that he had thought of going. She would have heard nothing about her hindering his work. She would have been ignorant of his money embarrassments. He couldn’t unsay anything now. It was as though a force, stronger than himself, had conspired to drive him to this crisis. He saw her in his mind’s eye, slipping out at midnight to send him that message. His tenderness magnified her kindness and clothed her with pathos. The unkindness of the thoughts he had had of her that day rose up like conscience to reproach him. From the first he had misjudged her. He had always misjudged her. He forgot all her omissions, remembering only her periods of graciousness.
He didn’t send the cable to his mother. He went upstairs and commenced packing. It was only a precaution, he told himself; he wasn’t really going. To-morrow they would cease to be serious and would laugh about to-night.
When to-morrow came, he phoned her. Vashti answered. “She didn’t sleep here, Teddy. She left half-an-hour after you left; she made me promise not to tell you where she was going.—She was crying. She said she was sure you hated her or that you would hate her one day.—What’s that? No. I think you’re doing right I should advise you to sail. It’ll do her good to miss you.—Yes, if she comes in, I’ll tell her.”
When he had seen his boxes put on the express-wagon, it began to dawn on him that he was doing things for the last time. He still told himself that he wasn’t going. He still procrastinated over sending the cable. Yet he proceeded mechanically with preparations for departure. He saw his publisher. He interviewed magazine-editors. He promised to execute work in the near future. He lunched at the Astor by himself, at a table across which he had often faced her. The waiter showed concern at seeing him alone and made discreet inquiries after “Madame.” Wherever he turned he saw girls with young men. The orchestra played rag-time tunes that they had hummed together. Every sight and sound was a reminder. The gayety burlesqued his unhappiness.
After lunch he had an inspiration: of course she was at Fluffy’s. He felt certain that he had only to talk with her to put matters right.
Fluffy was out. It was her maid’s voice that answered; she professed to know nothing of the movements of Miss Jodrell.
Night gathered—the night before Christmas with its intangible atmosphere of legendary excitements. All the world over stockings were being hung at the ends of beds and children were listening for Santa Claus’s reindeers. Caf茅s and restaurants were thronged with men and women in evening-dress. Taxis purred up before flashing doorways and girls stepped out daintily. Orchestras were crashing out syncopated music. In cleared spaces, between tables, dancers glided. If he hadn’t been so wise, he might have been one of them.
Slowly, like pirouetting faeries, snowflakes drifted gleaming down the dusk. It was the first snow since that memorable flight to the country.
The pain of his loneliness was more than he could bear. There was no use in telephoning. Perhaps she had been at home all the time and had given orders that people should say she was out. Quite likely! But why? Why should she avoid him? She seemed to have been so near to loving him last night. What had she meant by telling her mother that he hated her or would hate her one day? He had said and done nothing that would hint at that The idea that he should ever hate her was absurd. Perhaps the “horrid me” had got the upper-hand—that would account for it.
Eight o’clock! Four more hours! At midnight the ship sailed.
He hurried to the apartment in Riverside Drive. The elevator-boys told him that the ladies were out. He refused to believe them and insisted on being taken up. He knocked at the door and pressed the button. Dead silence. Even Twinkles didn’t answer.
He was seized with panic. They might have gone to the Brevoort, expecting to say good-by to him there. He rushed back.. No one had inquired for him. The laughter of merry-makers in the white-mirrored dining-room was a mockery. He hid himself in his room upstairs—his room which would be a stranger’s to-morrow.
Nine! Ten! He sat with his head between his hands. He kept counting from one to a hundred, encouraging himself that the telephone would tinkle before he had completed the century. It did once—a wrong number. He attempted to get on to both the apartment and Fluffy’s a score of times. “They’re out—out—out.” The answer came back with maddening regularity. The telephone operators recognized his anxious voice; they cut him off, as though he were a troublesome child, before he had completed his question.
He grew ashamed. At last he grew angry. It wasn’t decent of Desire. He had given her no excuse for the way she was acting.
He pulled out his watch. Nearly eleven! Slipping into his coat and picking up his bag, he glanced round the room for the last time. What interminable hours he had wasted there—waiting for her, finding explanations for her, cutting cards to discover by necromancy whether she would marry him! With a sigh that was almost of relief, he opened the door and switched off the light.
While his bill was being receipted at the desk, he wrote out a cable to his mother:
“Sailing Christmas Eve. ’Mauretania”
It would reach them as they were sitting down to breakfast to-morrow—a kind of Christmas present.
At last he had made the step final. He wondered how far he had paralleled Hal. The comparison should end at this point; he had better things to do than to mope away his life.
On arriving at the dock he inquired for letters. He was informed that he would find them on board at the Purser’s office. A long queue of people was drawn up. He took his place impatiently at the end. He told himself that this episode was ended; that from first to last his share had been undignified. Doubtless he would marry her some day; but until she was ready, he would not think about her. He thought of nothing else. Each time the line moved up his heart gave a thump. There might be one from her. He became sure there was one from her. A man named Godfrey, two places ahead, was being served. As the G’s were sorted, he watched sharply; he made certain he had seen a letter in her hand.
At last it was his turn.
“You have a letter for me. Theodore Gurney.”
A minute’s silence.
“Nothing, sir.”
“But are you sure? I thought I saw one.”
“I’ll look again if you like.—Nothing.”
He staggered as he walked away. His face was set and white. An old lady touched him gently. “Is the news so bad?”
He shook off her kindness and laughed throatily. “News I No, it’s nothing.”
He felt ill and unmanned. Tears tingled behind his eyes. He refused to shed them. They seemed to scald his brain. He didn’t care whether he lived or died. He’d given so much; he’d planned such kindness; he’d dreamed with such persistent courage. The thanks he had received was “Nothing.”
He found his way out on deck and leant across the rail. A gang-plank had been lowered to his right. Passengers came swarming up it, laughing with their friends—diners from Broadway who were speeding the parting guest. Some of them seemed to be dancing; the rhythm of the rag-time was in their steps. For the most part they were in evening-dress. The opera-cloaks and wraps of women flew back, exposing their throats and breasts. He twisted his mouth into a bitter smile. They employed their breasts for ornament, not for motherhood. They were all alike.
He had lost count of time while standing there. His eyes brooded sullenly through the drifting snow on the sullen water and the broken lights. Shouted warnings that the ship was about to sail were growing rare. The tardiest of the visitors were being hurried down the gang-plank. Sailors stood ready to cast away and put up the rail.
There was a commotion. Hazily he became aware of it A girl had become hysterical. She seemed alone; which was odd, for she was in evening-dress. She was explaining, almost crying, and wringing her hands. She was doing her best to force her way on deck; a steward and a man in uniform were turning her back.
Suddenly he realized. He was fighting towards her through the crowd. He had his hand on the steward’s shoulder. “Damn you. Don’t touch her.”
The ship’s eyes were on them. His arms went about her.
“I couldn’t stop away,” she whispered. “I had to come at the last moment. I was almost too late. I’ve been a little beast all day. I want to hear you say you forgive me, Teddy.”
He was thinking quickly.
“You’ve come by yourself?”
“I slipped away from a party. Nobody knows.”
“You can’t go back alone. I’ll come with you. I’m not sailing.”
She laughed breathlessly. “But your luggage!”
“Hang my luggage.”
She took his face between her hands as though no one was watching. “Meester Deek, I shouldn’t have come if I’d thought it would make you a coward.”
“A coward, but———”
She rested her cheek against his face. “Your mother’s expecting you. And—and we’ll meet so very soon.”
“Give me something,” he implored her; “something for remembrance.”
She looked down at herself. What could she give him? “Your little curl.”
“But it’s false.”
“But it’s dear,” he murmured.
An officer touched him. He glanced across his shoulder and nodded. This, then, was the end.
He drew her closer. “I can’t tell you. I never have told you. In all these months I’ve told you nothing.—I love you. I love you.—Your lips just once, Princess.”
Her obedient mouth lay against his own. Her lips were motionless. She slipped from him.
Waving and waving, he watched her from the deck. Now he lost her; again he saw her where raised screens in the sheds made golden port-holes. She raced along the dock, as with bands playing the Christmas ship stole out. Now that it was too late, she hoarded every moment. Beneath a lamp, leaning out through the drift of snowflakes, she fluttered a scarf that she had torn from her throat It was the last glimpse he had of her. A Goddess of Liberty she seemed to him; a slave of freedom, Horace would have said.
He was like a man from the tropics suddenly transplanted to an Arctic climate. He was chilled to the soul; the coldness brought him misery, but no reaction. His vigor had been undermined by the uncertainties and ardors which he had endured. Building a fire out of his memories, he shivered and crouched before it.
Hour by hour in the silence of his brain he relived the old pulsating languors. He had no courage to look ahead to any brightness in the future. The taste of the present was as ashes in his mouth. He felt old, disillusioned, exhausted. The grayness of the plunging wintry sea was the reflection of his soul’s gray loneliness.
He had spent so long in listening and waiting that listening and waiting had become a habit. He would hear the telephone tinkle soon. His heart would fly up like a bird into his throat. Her voice would steal to him across the distance: “Meester Deek, hulloa! What are we going to do this morning?” He often heard it in imagination. He could not bear to believe that at last his leisure was his own—that suspense was at once and forever ended.
Among the passengers he was a romantic figure. Stories went the rounds about him. It was said that the girl who had delayed the sailing was an actress—no, an heiress—no, one of the most beautiful of the season’s d茅butantes. Men’s eyes followed him with envy. Women tried to coax him into a confession—especially the old lady who had met him coming white-faced from the Purser’s office. He was regarded as a triumphant lover; he alone knew that he was an impostor.
His grip on reality had loosened. There were times when he believed she had never existed. He was a child who had slept in a ring of the faeries. He had seen the little people steal out from brakes and hedges. All night In their spider-web and glow-worm raiment they had danced about him, caressing him with their velvet arms. The dawn had come; he sat up rubbing his eyes, to find himself forsaken. He would wake up in Eden Row presently to discover that all his ecstasies had been imagined.
The little false curl was a proof to the contrary. He carried it near his heart. It was the Nell Gwynn part of her—a piece of concrete personality. It still seemed to mock his seriousness.
He had left so many things unsaid; in all those months he had told her nothing. He argued his way over the old ground, blaming himself and making excuses for her. If only he had acted thus and so, then she would have responded accordingly. He was almost persuaded that he had been unkind to her. And there was so much—so much more than he had imagined, from which he ought to save her. If she played with other men as she had played with him, she would be in constant danger. She seemed to regard men as puppies who could be sent to heel by a frown. Mr. Dak had taught her nothing. She skirted the edge of precipices when strong winds were blowing. She would do it once too often; the day was always coming. It might come to-morrow.
He missed her horribly—all her tricks of affection and petulance. He had so much to remember: her casual way of singing in the midst of his talking; the way she covered her mouth with her hand, laughing over it, that she might provoke him into coaxing apart her fingers that he might reach her lips through them; the waving down the stairs at the hour of parting—every memory flared into importance now that she had vanished. Most of all, he missed the name she had called him. Meester Deek I What a fool he had been to be so impatient because she would not employ the name by which any one could call him!
No, he hadn’t realized her value. Their separation was his doing. He might have been with her now, if only——
And back there at the end of the lengthening wake, did Broadway still flash and glitter, a Vanity Fair over which sky-signs wove ghostly and monstrous sorceries?
At night he paced the deck, staring into the unrelieved blackness. With whom was she now? Was she thinking of him? Was she thinking of him with kindness, or had the “horrid me” again taken possession? Perhaps she was with Fluffy. “Oh, these men!” Fluffy would say contemptuously. She was with some one—he knew that; it was impossible to think of her as sitting alone. She wouldn’t allow herself to be sad; she was somewhere where there was feverish gayety, lights and the seduction of music. But with whom?
He saw again her little white bedroom which had been such a secret. On the dressing-table, where it could watch her night and morning at her mirror, was the silver-framed photograph. (She had never asked him for his portrait) In a line on the wall, looking down on her as she lay curled up in bed, were four more photographs. His jealousy became maddening. His old suspicions crept back to haunt him. Who was this Tom? What claims had he on her? Was Tom her permanent lover, and he the man with whom she had trifled for relaxation—was that it? Even in the moment of parting, after she had shown herself capable of abandon, her lips had been motionless beneath his passion. To her he had offered himself soul and body; at intervals she had been sorry for him.
His one consolation was in writing to her—that made her seem nearer. He poured out his heart hour after hour, in unconsidered, fiery phrases. The journal which he kept for her on the voyage was less a journal of contemporary doings than of rememberings. It was a history of all their intercourse, stretching back from the scarf fluttered on the dock to the far-off, cloistral days of childhood. He believed that in the writing of it he became telepathic; messages seemed to reach him from her. He heard her speaking so distinctly that at times he would drop his pen and glance across his shoulder: “Meester Deek! Meester Deek!” He noted down the hours when the phenomenon occurred, begging her to tell him whether at these hours she had been thinking of him. Like a refrain, to which the music was forever returning, “I shall wait for you always—always,” he wrote.
“And we’ll meet so very soon,” she had said at parting. What had she meant? He had had no time to ask her. Had she meant that she would follow him—that she had at last reached the point at which she could not do without him? That she wasn’t going to California? That her foolish and excessive friendship for Fluffy had ceased to be of supreme importance? “And we shall meet so soon.” He built his hopes on that promise.
In the moments just before sleeping he was almost physically conscious of her. When lights along passageways of the ship had been lowered and feet no longer clattered on the decks, when only the thud of the engines sounded, the swish of waters and the sigh of sleepers, then he believed she approached him. He prayed Matthew Arnold’s prayer, and it seemed to him that it was answered:
“Come to me in my dreams and then
By day I shall be well again!
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.”
They say love is blind; it would be truer to say love is lenient. He had intervals of calmness when he appreciated to the full the wisdom of what he was doing. He recognized her faults; he recognized them with tenderness as the imperfections which sprang from her environment. If he could take her out of her hot-house, her limp attitudes towards life would straighten and her sanity would grow fresh. The trouble was that she preferred her hothouse and the orchid-people by whom she was surrounded; she had never known the blowy gardens of the world, which lie honest beneath the rain and stars. She pitied them for their blustering robustness. She pitied him for the distinctions he made between right and wrong. They impressed her as barbarous. Once, when she had told him that she was cold by temperament, he had answered, “You save yourself for the great occasions.” He was surer of that than ever; he was only afraid that the great occasion might not prove to be himself. There lay the hazard of his experiment in leaving her.
He dared not count on her final act of remorse. She was theatrical by temperament. To arrive at the last moment when a ship was sailing had afforded her a fine stage-setting. Her conduct might have meant everything; it might have meant no more than a girl’s display of emotionalism.
He began to understand her. It was like her to become desperate to inveigle him back just when he had resigned himself to forget her. In the past he had grown afraid to set store by her graciousness or to plan any kindness for her. To allow her to feel her power over him seemed to blunt her interest. It was always after he had shown her coldness that she had shown him most affection. Directly he submitted to her fascination, she affected to become indifferent. It was a trick that could be played too often. If this see-saw game was too long continued, one of them would out-weary the other’s patience. If only he had been sure that she was missing him, his mind would have been comparatively at rest.
He disembarked at Fishguard an hour after midnight The December air was raw and damp. His first action on landing was to dispatch his journal-letter to her. As he drowsed in the cold, ill-lighted carriage it was of her that he thought Now that the voyage was ended, the ocean that lay between them seemed impassable as the gulf that is fixed between hell and heaven. She had seen the steamer—she had been a topic of conversation on board; but everything that he saw now, and would see from now on, was unfamiliar to her.
The entrance into London did nothing to cheer him. He had flying glimpses of stagnant gardens, windows like empty sockets plugged with fog, forlorn streets like gutters down which the scavenger dawn wandered between flapping lamps. London looked mean; even in its emptiness, it looked overcrowded. He missed the boastful tallness of New York. Before the train had halted his nostrils were full of the stale stench of cab-ranks and the sulphurous pollutions of engines. Milk-cans made a cemetery of the station; porters looked melancholy as mourners. His gorge rose against the folly of his return.
He had stepped out and was giving instructions about his luggage, when he heard his name called tremblingly. As he turned, he was swept into a whirlwind of embraces. His father stood by, preserving his dignity, giving all the world to understand that a father can disguise his emotions under all circumstances.
“But how did you get here?” Teddy asked. “It’s so shockingly early.”
“Been here most of the night,” his mother told him, between tears and laughter. “You didn’t think we were going to let you arrive unmet? And we didn’t keep Christmas. When we got your cable, we put all our presents away and waited for you.”
How was it that he had so far forgotten what their love had meant? He compared this arrival with his unwelcomed arrival in New York. A flush of warmth spread from his heart They had stayed awake all night on the wintry station that he might not be disappointed.
On the drive back in the cab, all through breakfast and as they sat before the fire through the lazy morning, they gossiped of the things of secondary importance—his work, the Sheerugs, his impressions of America. Of the girl in America they did not talk. His mother’s eyes asked questions, which his eyes avoided. His father, man-like, showed no curiosity. He sat comfortably puffing away at his pipe, feeling in his velvet-coat for matches, and combing his fingers through his shaggy hair, just as if he had no suspicions that anything divisive had happened. It was only when an inquisitive silence had fallen that he showed his sympathy, chasing up a new topic to divert their interest. Desire was not mentioned that day, nor the next; even when her letters began to arrive, Teddy’s reticence was respected. For that he was infinitely thankful. The ordeal of explaining and accepting pity would have been more than he could have borne. Pity for himself would have meant condemnation of her conduct. In the raw state of his heart, neither would have been welcome.
During the afternoon of the first day of his home-coming he visited Orchid Lodge. He was drawn there by the spectres of Desire’s past. Harriet admitted him. What a transformation! All the irksome glory was gone. Carriages no longer waited against the pavement. It was no longer necessary to strive to appear as if you really had “a nincome.”
Tiptoeing across the hall, he peeped into the parlor with its long French-windows. It was seated on the steps outside in the garden that he had listened to Alonzo convincing Mrs. Sheerug of his new-found wealth. It was a different Alonzo that he saw now—an Alonzo who carried him back to his childhood. Facing Mr. Ooze across the table, he was dealing out a pack of cards. He was in his shirtsleeves; Mr. Ooze wore a bowler hat at a perilous angle on the back of his bald head. Both were too intent on the game to notice that the door had opened.
“What d’you bet?” Mr. Sheerug was asking.
“Ten thousand,” Mr. Ooze answered.
“I’ll see you and raise you ten thousand. What’ve you got?”
Teddy closed the door gently and stole away. Was he really grown up? Had time actually moved forward? The thin and the fat man sat there, as in the days when he had supposed they were murderers, still winning and losing fabulous fortunes in the unconquered land of their imaginations.
Upstairs, in the spare-room, he found Mrs. Sheerug. With a bag of vivid-colored wools beside her, she was busy on a new tapestry. She rose like a little old hen from its nest at the sound of his entrance. Her arms flew up to greet him.
“You’ve come back.”
“I’ve come back.”
That was all. Whatever she had guessed, she asked no questions. Had they all agreed to a kindly conspiracy of silence?
As he sat at her feet, watching her work, she told him philosophically of the loss of their money. “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. I wouldn’t be so terribly sorry if it hadn’t given Alonzo sciatica of the back.”
“Do you get sciatica in the back?” he asked.
She peered at him over her spectacles. “Most people don’t, but that’s where he’s got it. He never does any work.—Oh, dear, if he’d only take my lemon cure! I’m sure he’d be better. I don’t think he wants to be better. He can sit about the house all day while he’s got it. Poor man, it doesn’t hurt him very badly.”
It soon became evident to Teddy that she wasn’t so cut up as might have been expected now that her wealth was gone. Straitened means gave her permission to muddle. “Those coachmen and men-servants,” she told him, “they worried me, my dear. Their morals were very lax.”
When he tried to find out what had really occurred to cause the collapse of her affluence, she shook her head. “Shady tricks, my dear—very shady. Unkind things were said.”
More than that he could not learn; she did not wish to pursue the subject further.
Little by little the old routine came back, and with it his ancient dread that nothing would ever happen. Every morning, the moment breakfast was ended, he climbed the many stairs to his room to work. From his window he could see his father in the studio, and the pigeons springing up like dreams from the garden and growing small above the battlements of house-tops. If he watched long enough, he might see Mr. Yaflfon come out on his steps, like an old tortoise that had wakened too early, thrusting its bewildered head out of its shell.
He wanted to work; he wanted to do something splendid. He longed more than he had ever longed before to make himself famous—famous that she might share his glory. At first his thoughts were slow in coming. Day and night, between himself and his imaginings she intruded, passing and re-passing. He saw her in all her attitudes and moods, wistful, friendly, and brooding. He could not escape her. Even his father and mother filled him with envy when he watched them; he and Desire should have been as they were, if things had turned out happily. Hal rose up as a warning of the man he might become.
Since he could think of nothing else, he determined to make her his story. Gradually his purpose cleared and concentrated; his book should be a statement of what she meant to him—an idealized commentary from his point of view on what had happened. He would call it The Book of Revelation. It should be a sequel to Life Till Twenty-One. His first book had been the account of love’s dreaming; this should be his record of its realization. After the idea had fastened on him, he rarely stirred out He wrote enfevered. If his lips had failed to tell her, she should at last know what she meant to him. As he wrote, he lost all consciousness of the public; his book was addressed to her.
Although he seemed to have lost her, he was perpetually recovering her. He re-found her in other men’s writings, in Keats’s love-letters to Fanny Brawne and particularly In Maud.
“O that ’twere possible
After long grief and pain
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again.”
He had never felt her arms about him, but such lines seemed the haunting echo of his own yearning. They gave tongue to the emotions which the dull ache of his heart had made voiceless.
He recovered her in the dusty portrait of Vashti, which had lain in disgrace in the stable for so many years. Vashti’s youthful figure, listening in the Garden Enclosed, was very like Desire’s; the lips, which his boyish kiss had blurred, prophesied kindness. He brought it out from its place of hiding and hung it on the wall above his desk.
He recovered her most poignantly in small ways: in the stubs of theatre-tickets for performances they had attended. When unpacking one of his trunks, he found some white hairs clinging to the sleeve of one of his coats. They set him dreaming of the pale, reluctant hands that had snuggled in the warmth of the white-fox muff.
But he recovered her most effectually a week after his home-coming, when her letters began to arrive. Not that they were satisfactory letters; if they had been, they would not have been like her. Her sins as a correspondent were the same as her sins of conduct: they consisted of things omitted. Where she might have said something comforting, she filled up the sentence with dots and dashes. He begged her to confess that she was missing him. She escaped him. She let all his questions go unanswered. There was a come-and-find-me laughter in her way of writing. She would tell him just enough to make him anxious—no more. She had been to this play; she had danced at that supper; last Sunday she had automobiled with a jolly party out into the country. Of whom the jolly party had consisted she left him in ignorance.
Strange letters these to receive in the old-fashioned quiet of Eden Row, where days passed orderly and marshaled by duties! They came fluttering to him beneath the gray London skies, like tropic birds which had lost their direction. He would sit picturing her in an Eden Row setting, telling himself stories of the wild combinations of circumstances that might bring her tripping to him!
He was homesick for the faeries. He felt dull in remembering her intenser modes of living—modes of living which in his heart he distrusted. They could not last. There lay his hope. When they failed, she might turn to him for security. He excused her carelessness. Why, because he was sad, should she not be glad-hearted? For such leniency he received an occasional reward, as when she wrote him, “I do wish I could hear your nice English voice. I met a lady the other day who asked me, ‘Is there any chance of your marrying Theodore Gurney? If you don’t, you’re foolish.’ You’d have loved her.” And then, in a mischievous postscript, “I forgot to tell you, she said you had beautiful eyes.”
Tantalizing as an echo of laughter from behind a barrier of hills!
In her first letters she coquetted with various forms of address: Meester Deek; Dear Meester Deek; My Dear. This last seemed to please her as a perch midway between the chilliness of friendship and too much fervor. She settled down to it. Her endings were equally experimental: Your Friend Desire; Your Little Friend; Yours of the White Foxes; Yours affectionately, the Princess. Usually her signature was preceded by some such sentiment as, “You know you always have my many thoughts”—which might mean anything. She never committed herself.
His chief anxiety was to discover what she had meant by her promise that they would meet very shortly. She refused to tell him. Worse still, as time went on, he suspected that she was missing him less and less. While to him no happiness was complete without her, she seemed to be embarrassed by no such curtailment. Her good times were coming thick and fast; her infatuation for Fluffy seemed to have strengthened. At last word reached him in February that they were off to California; she was too full of anticipation to express regret for the extra three thousand miles that would part them. On the day before she started, he cabled the florist at the Brevoort to send her flowers. In return he received a line of genuine sentiment. “Meester Deek, you are thoughtful! I nearly cried when I got them. You’ll never know what they meant. New York hasn’t been New York without you. It was almost as though you yourself had brought them. I wanted to run out and stop you, waving and waving to you down the stairs.”
That was the climax. From that point on her correspondence grew jerky, dealing more and more with trivial externals and less and less with the poignant things of the past. In proportion as she withdrew from him, he tried to call her back with his sincerity. When he complained of her indifference, she told him mockingly, “I’m keeping all your letters. They’ll give you away entirely when I bring my suit for breach of promise.”
He could detect Fluffy’s influence, “Oh, these men!” He waited longer and longer to hear from her. Sometimes three weeks elapsed. Then from Santa Barbara she wrote, “I’m having such a gay time. Don’t you envy me? I’m riding horseback and some one is teaching me to drive a car.”
He knew what that meant. How could she travel so far and freely without attracting love? A man had appeared on the horizon.
For a day he was half-minded to go to her. It was no longer a question, of whether she wanted him, but of whether he could live without her. He answered in a fit of jealousy and self-scorn, “I wish I had your faculty for happiness. I hope your good times are lasting.” And then the fatal phrase, “I’m afraid you’re one of those lucky persons who feel nothing very deeply.”
It was his first written criticism of her. She kept him waiting six weeks for a reply; when it came it was cabled. He broke the seal tremblingly, not daring to conjecture what he might expect. Her message was contained in one line, “I hate you to be flippant” After keeping him waiting so long, she had been in a great hurry to send him those six words. After that dead silence. It dawned on him that everything was ended.
He had completed his book. It was in the printer’s hands and he knew that once more success had come to him. Money was in sight; nothing kept her from him except her own wayward heart of thistledown. He still believed the best of her. With the courage of despair he told himself that, sooner or later, he was bound to marry her. Perhaps she was keeping away from him out of a sense of justice, because she could not yet care for him sufficiently. When his book had found her, she would relent Glancing through his paper one June morning, his eye was arrested by the head-lines of a motor-accident. It had happened to a party of newly-landed Americans, two women and three men, on the road from Liverpool to London. He caught sight of the name of Janice Audrey, and then—— Dashing out into Eden Row, he ran to Orchid Lodge. Hal was setting out for business, when he intercepted him. Thrusting the paper into his hand, he pointed.
He had not been allowed to see her. She had been at Orchid Lodge for three days. No one was aware of his special reason for wanting to see her. Not even to his mother had he let fall a hint that Desire was the girl for whose sake he had stayed in America. His thoughtfulness in making inquiries and in sending flowers was attributed to his remembrance of their childhood’s friendship.
“Her bedroom’s a bower already,” Hal told him; “you really mustn’t send her any more just yet.”
“Does she ask about me?” He awaited the answer breathlessly.
“Sometimes. I was telling her only this morning how you’d spent the autumn in New York.”
“Did she say anything?”
“She was interested.”
He could imagine the mischief that had crept into her gray eyes as she had listened to whatever Hal had told her. Why didn’t she send for him?
As far as he could learn, she wasn’t hurt—only shaken. He suspected that Mrs. Sheerug was making her an excuse for a bout of nursing. The house went on tiptoe. The door of the spare-room opened and closed softly.
He had to see her. It was on the golden evening of the fourth day that he waylaid Hal on the stairs. “Would you please give her this note? I’ll wait. There’ll be an answer. I’m sure of it.”
Hal eyed him curiously. Up till now he had been too excited to notice emotion in any one else. For the first time he seemed to become aware of the eagerness with which Teddy mentioned her. He took the note without a word.
For several minutes Teddy waited. They seemed more like hours. From the Park across the river came the ping of tennis and the laughter of girls. A door opened. Mrs. Sheerug’s trotting footsteps were approaching. As she came in sight, she lowered her head and blinked at him above the rims of her spectacles.
“My grand-daughter says she wants to thank you for the flowers. She insists on thanking you herself. I don’t know whether it’s right. She’s in—— She’s an invalid, you know.”
Leaving her to decide this point of etiquette, he hurried along the passage and tapped. He heard her voice and thrilled to the sound. “Now don’t any of you disturb us till I call for you.—Promise?”
As Hal slipped out, he left the door open and nodded. “She’ll see you.”
Pushing aside the tapestry curtain of Absalom, he entered. A breeze was ruffling the curtains. Against the wall outside ivy whispered. The evening glow, pouring across tree-tops, gilded the faded gold of the harp and filled the room with an amber vagueness.
She was sitting up in bed, propped on pillows, with a blue shawl wrapped about her shoulders. She looked such a tiny Desire—such a girl. Her bronze-black hair was braided in a plait and fell in a long coil across the bedclothes. Their eyes met. He halted.
Slowly her face broke into a smile. “I wonder which of us has been the worse.”
He knelt at her side, pressing her hand.
“Which is it, Meester Deek? D’you remember their names? It’s Miss Independence. I wouldn’t kiss it if I were you; it’s an unkind, a scratchy little hand.”
He raised his eyes. “Are you very much hurt?”
She gazed down at him mockingly. “By the accident or by your letter?—By the accident, no. By your letter, yes. I do feel things deeply—I was feeling them more than ordinarily deeply just then. I didn’t like you when you wrote that.”
“But I wrote you so often. I told you how sorry I was. You never answered.”
She crouched her chin against her shoulder. “Shall I tell you the absolute truth? It’s silly of me to give away my secrets; a girl ought always to be a mystery.” Her finger went up to her mouth and her eyes twinkled. “It was because I knew that I was coming to England. I wanted to see how patient you—— You understand?”
He jumped to his feet. “Then you hadn’t chucked me? All the time you were intending to come to me?”
She winked at him. “Perhaps, and perhaps not. It would have depended on my temper and how full I was with other engagements.—No, you’re not to kiss me when I’m in bed; it isn’t done in the best families.”
He drew back from her, laughing. “How good it is to be mocked! And how d’you like your family?” He seated himself on the edge of the bed.
“Not there,” she reproved him; “that isn’t done either. Bring a chair.”
When he had obeyed, she lay back with her face towards him and let him take her hand.
“Meester Deek, it’s very sweet to have a father.”
When he nodded, she shook her head. “You needn’t look so wise. You don’t know anything about it; you’ve had a father always. But to find a father when you’re grown up—that’s what’s so sweet and wonderful.” She fell silent. Then she said, “It’s like having a lover you don’t need to be afraid of. We know nothing unhappy about each other; he’s never had to whip me or be cross with me, the way he would have done if I’d always been his little girl.—You do look funny, Meester Deek; I believe you’re envying me and—and almost crying.”
“It was in this room,” he said, “that I first met your mother. I heard her singing when I was lying in this very bed. She looked like you, Princess; and in fun she asked me to marry her.”
Desire laughed softly. “I haven’t—not even in fun.” Then quickly, to prevent what he was on the point of saying, “I would have liked to have known you, Meester Deek, when you were quite, quite little. You’d never guess what I and my father talk about.”
He had to try. At each fresh suggestion she shook her head.
“About my beautiful mother. Isn’t it wonderful of him to have remembered and remembered? I believe if I wanted, I could help them to marry. Only,” she looked away from him, “that would spoil the romance.”
“It wouldn’t spoil it Why do you always speak as if——”
She pursed her lips. “It would. Marriage may be very nice, but it doesn’t do to let people know you too well. And then, there’s another reason: Mrs. Sheerug’s a dear, but she doesn’t like my mother.”
“Doesn’t she?” He did his best to make his voice express surprise.
“You know she doesn’t. And she has her doubts about me, too. I can tell that by the way she says, ’My dear, you laugh like your mother,’ as if to laugh like my mother was a crime. She thinks it’s wrong to be gay. I think in her heart she hates my mother.”
Suddenly she sat up. “All from you, and I haven’t thanked you yet!”
He looked round the room; the amber had faded to the silver of twilight. In vases and bowls the flowers he had sent her glimmered like memories and threw out fragrance.
Her fingers nestled closer in his hand. “I’m not good at thanking, but—— Ever since I met you, all along the way there’s been nothing but kindness. What have I given you in return?—Don’t tell me, because it won’t be true.—You can kiss my cheek just once, Meester Deek, if you do it quietly.”
She bent towards him. In that room, where so many things had happened, with the perfumed English dusk steal ing in at the window, she seemed to have become for the first time a part of his real world.
“Shall we tell them, Princess?”
“Tell them?”
“About New York?”
She laid her finger on his lips. “No. It’s the same with me now as it was with you in New York. You never mentioned me in your letters to your mother. Besides, don’t you think it’ll be more exciting if only you and I know it?” Her voice sank. “I’m changed somehow. Perhaps it’s having a father. I want to be good and little. And—and he wouldn’t be proud of me if he knew——”
The door opened. Desire withdrew her hand swiftly. Mrs. Sheerug entered.
“Why, it’s nearly dark!” She struck a match and lit the gas. “I waited for you to call me, and since you didn’t——”
Teddy rose. “I’ve stayed rather long.”
He shook Desire’s hand conventionally. At the door, as he lifted the tapestry to pass out, he glanced back. Mrs. Sheerug was closing the window. Desire kissed the tips of her fingers to him.
It seemed that at last all his dreams were coming true. During the week that followed he spent many hours in the spare-room. She was soon convalescent. Her trunks had been sent from Fluffy’s house and all her pretty, decorative clothes unpacked. Mrs. Sheerug thought them vain and actressy, but the spell of Desire was over her.
“She thinks I’ll come to a bad end,” Desire said. “Perhaps I shall.”
Usually he found her sitting by the window in a filmy peignoir and boudoir-cap. Very often her father was beside her. Hal’s relations with her were peculiarly tender. He was more like a lover than a father. He had changed entirely; there was a brightness in his eyes and an alertness in his step. He seemed to be re-finding her mother in her and to be re-capturing his own lost youth.
Teddy rarely heard any of their conversations. When he appeared, they grew silent. Even if Desire had not told him, he would have guessed that it was of Vashti they had been talking. Presently Hal would make an excuse to leave them. When the door had shut, Desire would slip her hand into his. Demonstrations of affection rarely went beyond that now. The place where they met and the continual possibility of interruption restrained them. There was another reason as far as Teddy was concerned: he realized that in New York he had cheapened his affection by forcing it on her. She told him as much.
“You thought that I was holding back; I wasn’t then, and I’m not now. Only—I hardly know how to put it—the first time you do things they thrill me; after that—— The second kiss is never as good as the first. Every time we repeat something it becomes less important. So you see, if we married, when we could do things always—I think that’s why I never kissed you. I wasn’t holding off; I was saving the best.”
A new frankness sprang up between them. They discussed their problem with a comic air of aloofness. Now that he gave her no opportunities to repulse him, her fits of coldness became more rare. Sometimes she would invite the old intimacies. “Meester Deek, I’m not sure that it’s so much fun being only friends.”
He was amused by her na茂vet茅. “Perhaps it isn’t But don’t let’s spoil things by talking about it. Let’s be sensible.” In these days it was he who said, “Let’s be sensible.” She pouted when he said it, and accused him of strategy. “Be sweet to me, like you were.”
He steeled himself against her coquetry. Until she could tell him that his love was returned, he must not let her feel her power. “When you can do that,” he told her, “we’ll cease to be only friends.”
“And yet I do wish you’d pilfer sometimes.” She clasped her hands against her throat. “I want you, and I don’t want you. I don’t want any. one to have you; but if I had you always to myself, I shouldn’t know what to do with you. You’d be awful strict, I expect” She sighed and sank back in her chair. “It’s such a large order—marriage. I’m so young. A girl mortgages her whole future.”
She always approached these discussions from the angle of doubt. “When it was too late, you might see a girl you liked better.”
He assured her of the impossibility. She shook her head wisely. “It has happened.”
He read in her distrust the influence of the people among whom her girlhood had been spent, the Vashtis, Fluffys, and Mr. Daks—the slaves of freedom who, having disdained the best in life, used pleasure as a narcotic. He knew that it was not his inconstancy that she dreaded, but the chance that after marriage she herself might be fascinated by some man. The knowledge made him cautious. Nothing that he could say would carry any weight; he would be a defendant witnessing in his own defense. That she was willing to open her mind to him kept him hopeful. It was a step forward.
He brought his mother to see her. When she had gone Desire said, “I know now what you meant when you wanted me to be proud of you. I’d give anything to feel that I was really needed by a man I loved.” And then, “Meester Deek, you never talk to me about your work. Won’t you let me see what you’ve been doing?”
He brought to her the book he had written for her that it might tell her the things which his lips had left unsaid. After she had commenced it, she refused to see him until she had reached the end.
She heard his footsteps in the passage; her eyes were watching before he entered. Her lips moved, but she thought better of it. He drew a chair to her side. “Well?”
She gazed out of the window. “It’s all about us.” Then, with a laughing glance at him, “I don’t know whatever you’d do, if you didn’t have me to write about.”
“I wrote it for you,” he whispered, “so that you might understand.”
She frowned. “And I was in California, having such good times.”
He waited.
“It’s very beautiful.” After an interval she repeated her words, “It’s very beautiful.” Without looking at him, she took his hand. “But it isn’t me. It’s the magic cloak—the girl you’d like me to become. I never shall be like that. If that’s what you think I am, you’ll be disappointed.” She turned to him appealingly. “Meester Deek, you make me frightened. You expect so much; you’re willing to give so much yourself. But I’m cold. I couldn’t return a grand passion. Wouldn’t you be content with less? Couldn’t we be happy if——”
He wanted to lie to her.
“You couldn’t,” she said.
He met her honest eyes. “No, I couldn’t. If—if you feel no passion after all these months, you’d feel less when we were married.”
She nodded sadly. “Yes, it would be the way it was in New York: I’d always be only just allowing you—neither of us could bear that.—So, if I were to tell you that I admired you—admired you more than any man I ever met—and that I was willing to marry you, you wouldn’t?”
“It wouldn’t be fair—wouldn’t be fair to you, Princess.” His voice trembled. “One day you yourself will want more than that.”
She no longer bargained for terms or set up her stage ambitions as a barrier. His restraint proved to her that she was approaching the crisis at which she must either accept or lose him. It was to postpone this crisis that she took advantage of Mrs. Sheerug’s anxiety to prolong her convalescence.
Towards the end of the second week of her visit Teddy got his car out. One day they ran down to Ware, hoping to find the farm. It was as though the country that they had known had vanished with their childhood.
Now that she began to get about, the glaring contrast between her standards and those of Eden Row became more apparent. Her clothes, the things she talked about, even her dancing way of walking pronounced her different. She began to get restless under the censures which she read in Mrs. Sheerug’s eyes.
“And what wouldn’t she say,” she asked Teddy, “if she knew that I’d smoked a cigarette? I do so want to use a little powder—and I daren’t.”
One afternoon when he called, he found the house in commotion. She was packing. Fluffy had been to see her; after she had gone the pent-up storm of criticisms had burst Something had been said about Vashti—what it was he couldn’t learn. He insisted on seeing her. She came down with her face tear-stained and flushed. They walked out into the garden in silence. Where the shrubbery hid them from the house—the shrubbery in which he had first met Alonzo and Mr. Ooze—they sat down.
“Going?”
“Yes.”
“But do you think you ought to?”
“I’m not thinking. I’m angry. Mrs. Sheerug’s a dear; I know that as well as you. But she wants to reform me. She makes me wild when she says, ‘You have your mother’s laugh,’ as though being like my mother damned me. And she said something horrid about Fluffy and about the way I’ve been brought up.”
“Are you going to Fluffy’s now?”
She shook her head. “Fluffy’s leaving for the continent.”
“Then where?”
Suddenly she laughed. “With you, if you like.”
He stared at her incredulously. “With me?”
“Yes.”
He seized her hands, “You mean that you’ll——”
All the hunger to touch and hold her which he had staved off, urged him to passion. She turned her lips aside. He drew her to him, kissing her eyes and hair. He was full of sympathy for the fierceness in her heart; it was right that she should be angry in her mother’s defense.
“You queer Meester Deek, not marry you—I didn’t say that.” She tried to free herself, but he clasped her to him. “You must let me go or I won’t tell you.”
They sat closely, with locked hands.
“I’ve been thinking very carefully what to do. I’m not sure of myself. We need to be more certain of each other.”
“But how? How can we be more certain now you’re going?”
She smiled at his despair. “The honeymoon ought to come first,” she said. “Every marriage ought to be preceded by a honeymoon.” She spoke slowly. “A—a quite proper affair; it would be almost the same as being married. It’s only by being alone that two people have a chance to find each other out If we could do that without quarreling or getting tired—— What do you say? If you don’t say yes, you may never get another chance.”
When she saw him hesitating, she added, “You’re thinking of me. No one need know. We could meet in Paris.”
His last chance! Dared he trust himself?
“What day shall I meet you?” he questioned.
He caught the boat-train from Charing Cross. It was a sparkling morning in the last week of June, the season of hay-making and roses. He had received his instructions in a brief note. It bore no address; the postmark showed that it had been dispatched from Rouen. When the train was in motion he studied it afresh; he could have repeated it line for line from memory:
My dear,
Come Saturday. I’ll meet you in Paris at the Gare du Nord 445. Bring only hand-baggage—evening dress not necessary.
Here are my terms. No kissing, no love-making, nothing like that till I give permission. We’re just two friends who have met by accident and have made up our minds to travel together. Don’t join me, if you can’t live up to the contract.
Many thoughts,
Yours affectionately,
The Princess.
He had stared at the letter so long that they were panting through the hop-fields of Kent by the time he put it back in his pocket. A breeze silvered the backs of leaves, making them tremulous. The spires of Canterbury floated up.
He knew the way she traveled, with mountainous trunks and more gowns than she could wear. Why had she been so explicit that he should bring only hand-baggage? Was it because their time together was to be short, or because she knew that at the last minute she might turn coward? She had left herself another loop-hole: she had sent him no address. Even if she were there to meet him, he might miss her on the crowded platform. And if he did—— His fears lest he might miss her battled with his scruples.
Dover and the flash of the sea! Scruples dwindled in importance; the goal of his anticipations grew nearer.
On the boat there was a bridal couple. He watched them, trying to discover with how much discretion honeymoon people were supposed to act.
On French soil the gayety of his adventure caught him. One day they would repeat it; she would travel with him openly from London, and it wouldn’t be an experiment From Calais he would have liked to send a telegram—but to where? She was still elusive. The train was delayed in starting. He fumed and fretted; if it arrived late he might lose her. For the last hour, as he was nearing Paris, he sat with his watch in his hand.
Before they were at a standstill, he had leapt to the platform, glancing this way and that. He had begun to despair, when a slight figure in a muslin dress emerged from the crowd. He stared hard at the simplicity of her appearance, trying to fathom its meaning.
Disguising her emotion with mockery, she caught him by both hands. “What luck! I’ve been so lonely. Fancy meeting you here!” She laughed at him slyly through her lashes. She looked at his suit-case. “That all? Good. I wondered if you’d take me at my word.”
She moved round to the side on which he carried it, so that they had to walk a little apart In the courtyard, from among the gesticulating cochers, he selected a fiacre. As he helped her in he asked, “Where are we staying?”
“In the Rue St. Honor茅 at The Oxford and Cambridge; close by there are heaps of other hotels. You can easily find a good one.”
Again she surprised him; a fashionable hotel in the Place Vend么me was what he had expected.
They jingled off down sunlit boulevards. On tree-shadowed pavements tables were arranged in rows before caf茅s. Great buses lumbered by, drawn by stallions. Every sight and sound was noticeable and exciting. It was a world at whose meaning they could only guess; between it and themselves rose the barrier of language. Already the foreignness of their surroundings was forcing them together. They both felt it—felt it gladly; yet they sat restrained and awkward. None of their former unconventions gave them the least clews as to how they should act.
She turned inquisitive eyes on him. “Quite overcome, aren’t you? You didn’t expect to find such a modest little girl.—Tell me, Meester Deek, do you like the way I’m dressed?”
“Better than ever. But why——”
She clapped her hands. “For you. I’ll tell you later.”
She looked away as if she feared she had encouraged him too much. Again the silence settled down.
He watched her: the slope of her throat, the wistful drooping of her face, the folded patience of her hands.
“When does a honeymoon like ours commence?” he whispered.
She shrugged her shoulders and became interested in the traffic.
“Well, then if you won’t tell me that, answer me this question. How long does it last?”
She pursed her mouth and began to do a sum on her fingers. When she had counted up to ten, she peeped at him from under her broad-brimmed hat. “Until it ends.” Then, patting his hand quickly, “But it’s only just started. Don’t let’s think about the end—— Here, this hotel will do. Dig the cocher in the back. I’ll sit in the fiacre till you return; then there’ll be no explanations.”
He took the first room that was offered him, and regained his place beside her. All the time he had been gone, he had been haunted by the dread that she might drive off without him.
“What next?”
She smiled. “The old New York question. Anywhere—— I don’t care.” She slipped her arm into his and then withdrew it. “It is fun to be alone with you.”
He told the man to drive them through the Tuileries and over the river to the Luxembourg Gardens.
He touched her. She frowned. “Not here. It’s too full of Americans. We might be recognized.” Huddling herself into her corner, she tried to look as if he were not there.
As they came out on the quays, the river blazed golden, shining flash upon flash beneath its intercepting bridges. The sun was setting, gilding domes and spires. The sky was plumed and saffron with the smoke of clouds. Bareheaded work-girls were boarding trams; mischievous-eyed artisans in blue blouses jostled them. Eyes flung back glances. Chatter and a sense of release were in the air. The heart of Paris began to expand with the ecstasy of youth and passion. Her hand slipped from her lap and rested on the cushion. His covered it; by unspoken consent they closed up the space between them.
“Are you giving me permission?”
“Not exactly. Can you guess why I planned this? I—I wanted to be fair.”
“The strangest reason!” He laughed softly.
“But I did.” She spoke with pouting emphasis. “I’ve given you an awful lot of worry.”
“Don’t know about that. If you have, it’s been worth it.”
“Has it?” She shook her head doubtfully. “It might have been worth it, if——” A slow smile crept about her mouth. “Whatever happens, you’ll have had your honeymoon. People say it’s the best part of marriage.”
He didn’t know what she meant by a honeymoon. It wasn’t much like a honeymoon at present—it wasn’t so very different from the ride to Long Beach. He dared not question. Without warning, in the quick shifting of her moods, she might send him packing back to London.
They were crossing the Pont Neuf; her attention was held by a line of barges. When they had reached the farther bank, he reminded her, “You were going to tell me——”
He glanced at her dress. “Was it really for me that you did it?”
She nodded. “For you. I’m so artificial; I’m not ashamed of it. But until I saw you in Eden Row, I didn’t realize how different I am. In New York—well, I was in the majority. It was you who felt strange there. But in Eden Row I saw my father. He’s like you and—and it came over me that perhaps I’m not as nice as I fancy—not as much to be envied. There may even be something in what Mrs. Sheerug says.”
“But you are nice.” His voice was hot in her defense. “I can’t make out why you’re always running yourself down.”
She thought for a moment, brushing him with her shoulder. “Because I can stand it, and to hear you defend me, perhaps.—But it was for you that I bought this dress, Mees-ter Deek. I tried to think how you’d like me to look if—if we were always going to be together. And so I’ve given up my beauty-patch. And I won’t smoke a single cigarette unless you ask me. I’m going to live in your kind of a world and,” she bit her lip, inviting his pity, “and I’m going to travel without trunks, and I’ll try not to be an expense. I think I’m splendid.”
They drew up at the Luxembourg Gardens and dismissed the fiacre.
A band was playing. The splash of fountains and fluttering of pigeons mingled with the music. Seen from a distance, the statues of dryads and athletes seemed to stoop from their pedestals and to move with the promenading crowd. They watched the eager types by which they were surrounded: artists’ models, work-girls, cocottes; tired-eyed, long-haired, Daudetesque young men; Zouaves, chasseurs, Svengalis—they were people of a fiction world. Some walked in pairs—others solitary. Here two lovers embraced unabashed. There they met for the first time, and made the moment an eternity. Romance, the brevity of life, the warning against foolish caution were in the air. For all these people there was only one quest.
They had been walking separately, divided by shyness. In passing, a grisette swept against him, and glanced into his eyes in friendly fashion.
“Here, I won’t have that.” Desire spoke with a hint of jealousy. She drew nearer so that their shoulders were touching. “Nobody’ll know us. Don’t let’s be misers. I’ll take your arm,” she whispered.
“The second time you’ve done it.”
“When was the first?”
“That night at the Knickerbocker after we’d quarreled and I’d given you the bracelet.”
She smiled in amused contentment “How you do keep count!”
The band had ceased playing; only the music of the fountains was heard. Shadows beneath trees deepened. Constellations of street-lamps lengthened. Twilight came tiptoeing softly, like a young-faced woman with silver hair.
She hung upon his arm more heavily. “Oh, it’s good to be alone with you! You don’t mind if I don’t talk? One can talk with anybody.” And, a little later, “Meester Deek, I feel so safe alone with you.”
When they were back in thoroughfares, “Where shall we dine?” he asked her.
“In your world,” she said. “No, don’t let’s drive. This isn’t New York. We’d miss all the adventure. I’d rather walk now.”
After wandering the Boule Michel, losing their way half-a-dozen times and making inquiries in their guide-book French, they found the Caf茅 d’Harcourt. Its walls were decorated with student-drawings by artists long since famous. At a table in the open they seated themselves. Romance was all about them. It danced in the eyes of men and girls. Through the orange-tinted dusk it lisped along the pavement It winked at them through the blinds of pyramided houses.
She bent towards him. “You’ve become very respectful—not at all the Meester Deek that you were—more like a little boy on his best behavior.”
He rested his chin in his hand. “Naturally.”
“Why?”
“Your contract. I’m here on approval.”
“Let’s forget it,” she said. “I’m learning. I’ve learnt so much about life since we met.”
Through the meal she amused him by speaking in broken English and misunderstanding whatever he said. When it was ended he offered her a cigarette. “No. You’re only trying to be polite, and tempting me.”
They drove across the river and up the Champs-Elys茅es to a theatre where they had seen Polaire announced. The performance had hardly commenced, when she tugged at his arm. “Meester Deek, it’s summer outside. We’ve spent so much time in seeing things and people. I want to talk.” From under the shadow of trees he hailed a fiacre. “Where?”
“Anywhere.” When he had taken his place at her side, “You may put your arm about me,” she murmured drowsily.
They lay back gazing up at the star-strewn sky. Their rubber-tires on the asphalt made hardly any sound. They seemed disembodied, drifting through a pageant of dreams. The summer air blew softly on their faces; sometimes it bore with it the breath of flowers. The night world of Paris went flashing by, swift in its pursuit of pleasure. They scarcely noticed it; it was something unreal that they had left.
“What’s going on in your mind?”
She didn’t stir. She hung listless in his embrace. “I was thinking of growing old—growing old with nobody to care.—You care now; I know that But if I let you go, in five years’ time you’d——” He felt the shrug she gave her shoulders. “Mother’s the only friend I have. You might be the second if—— But mothers are more patient; they’re always waiting for you when you come back.”
“And I shall be always waiting. Haven’t I always told you that?”
“You’ve told me.” Then, in an altered tone, “Did you ever think you knew what happened in California?”
“I guessed.”
She freed herself and sat erect. “There was a man.” She waited, and when he remained silent, “You’d taught me to like to be loved. I didn’t notice it while you were with me, but I missed it terribly after you’d left. I used to cry. And then, out there—after he’d kissed me, I lay awake all night and shivered. I wanted to wash away the touch of his mouth. It was my fault; I’d given him chances and tried to fascinate him. I’d been so stingy with you—that made it worse; and he was a man for whom I didn’t care. I felt I couldn’t write. And it was when I was feeling’ so unhappy that your letter arrived.—Can’t you understand how a girl may like to flirt and yet not be bad?—I’m not saying that I love you, Meester Deek—perhaps I haven’t got it in me to love; only—only that of all men in the world, I like to be loved by you the best.”
He drew her closer to his side. “You dear kiddy.”
“You forgive me?”
It was late when they parted at the door of her hotel.
“I’ll try to be up early,” she promised. “We might even breakfast together. It’s the only meal we haven’t shared.”
He turned back to the streets. Passing shrouded churches, he came to the fire-crowned hill of Montmartre. He wandered on, not greatly caring where he went. From one of the bridges, when the vagueness of dawn was in the sky, he found himself gazing down at the black despair of the silent-flowing river. Wherever he had been, love that could be purchased had smiled into his eyes. The old fear took possession of him: he was different from other men. Why couldn’t he rouse her? Was it his fault—or because there was nothing to arouse?
She wore a troubled look when he met her next morning.
“Shall we breakfast here or at my hotel?”
“At yours,” she said sharply.
When she spoke like that she created the effect of being more distant than an utter stranger. It wasn’t until some minutes later, when they were seated at table, that he addressed her.
“There’s something that I want to say; I may as well say it now. When a man’s in love with a girl and she doesn’t care for him particularly, she has him at an ungenerous disadvantage: she can make a fool of him any minute she chooses. I don’t think it’s quite sporting of her to do it.”
Her graciousness came back. “But I do care for you particularly. Poor you! Did I speak crossly? Here’s why: we’ve got to leave Paris. There’s a man at my hotel who knows me. I wouldn’t have him see us together for the world.”
“So that was all? I was afraid I’d done something to offend.”
She made eyes at him above her cup of coffee. “You’re all right, Meester Deek. You don’t need to get nervous.—But where’ll we go for our honeymoon?”
“I’m waiting for it to commence.” He smiled ruefully. “You’re just the same as you always were.”
“But where’ll we go?” she repeated. “We’ve got all the world to choose from.”
He told the waiter to bring a Cook’s Time Table. Turning to the index, he began to read out the names alphabetically. “Aden?”
“Too hot,” she said.
“Algiers?”
“Same reason, and fleas as well.”
“Athens?”
“Too informing, and we don’t want any scandals—I’d be sure to meet a boy who shone my shoes in New York.—Here, give me the old book.—What about Avignon? We can start this evening and get there to-morrow.”
Through the gayety of the sabbath morning they made their way to Cook’s. While purchasing their tickets they almost came to words. He insisted that she would need a berth for the journey; she insisted that she wouldn’t.
“But you’re not used to sitting up all night. You’ll be good for nothing next morning. Do be reasonable.”
“I’m not used to a good many of the things we’re doing. I’m trying to save you expense. And I don’t think it’s at all nice of you to lose your temper.”
“I didn’t,” he protested.
“A matter of opinion,” she said.
When he had bought a guide-book on Provence, they walked out into the sunlight in silence. They reached the Pont de la Concorde; neither of them had uttered a word. With a gap of about a foot between them, they leant against the parapet, watching steamers puff in to the landing to take aboard the holiday crowd. She kept her face turned away from him, with her chin held at a haughty angle. In an attempt to pave the way to conversation, he commenced to read about Avignon in his guide-book.
Suddenly she snatched it from him and tossed it into the river. He watched it fall; then stared at her quietly. Like a naughty child, appalled by her own impishness, she returned his stare.
“Two francs fifty banged for nothing!” She closed up the distance between them, snuggling against him like a puppy asking his forgiveness.
“Meester Deek, you can be provoking. I got up this morning intending to be so fascinating. Everything goes wrong.—And as for that berth,” she made her voice small and repentant, “I was only trying to be sweet to you.”
“I, too, was trying to be decent.” He covered her hand. “How is it? I counted so much on this—this experiment, or whatever you call it. We’re not getting on very well.”
“We’re not.” She lifted her face sadly. In an instant the cloud vanished. The gray seas in her eyes splashed over with merriment. “It’ll be all right when we get out of Paris. You see if it isn’t! Quite soon now my niceness will commence.”
“Then let’s get out now.”
They ran down to the landing and caught a steamer setting out for S猫vres. From S猫vres they took a tram to Versailles. It was late in the afternoon when they got back to Paris with scarcely sufficient time to dine and pack.
All day he had been wondering whether, in her opinion, her niceness had commenced. They had enjoyed themselves. She had taken his arm. She had treated him as though she claimed him. But they had broken no new ground. He felt increasingly that the old familiarities had lost their meaning while the new familiarities were withheld. She was still passionless. She allowed and she incited, but she never responded. When they had arrived at the farthest point that they had reached in their New York experience, she either halted or turned back. She played at a thing which to him was as earnest as life and death. He had once found a dedication which read about as follows: “To the woman with the dead soul and the beautiful white body.” There were times when the words seemed to have been written for her.
At the station he searched in vain for an empty carriage. At last he had to enter one which was already occupied. Their companion was a French naval officer, who had a slight acquaintance with English, of which he was exceedingly proud. He informed them that he was going to Marseilles to join his ship; since Marseilles was several hours beyond Avignon, all hope that they would have any privacy was at an end. They had been in crowds and public places ever since they had met; now this stranger insisted on joining in their conversation. He addressed himself almost exclusively to Desire; under the flattering battery of his attentions she grew animated. Finding himself excluded, Teddy looked out of the window at the pollarded trees and flying country. He felt like the dull and superseded husband of a Guy de Maupassant story.
Night fell. When it was time to hood the lamp, the stranger still kept them separate by his gallantry in inviting her to change comers with him, that she might steady herself while she slept by slipping her arms through the loops which he had hung from the baggage-rack.
In the darkness Teddy drowsed occasionally; but he never entirely lost consciousness. With tantalization his love grew furious. It was tinged with hatred now. He glanced across at the quiet girl with the shadows lying deep beneath her lashes. Her eyes were always shuttered; every time he hoped that he might surprise her watching him. The only person he surprised was the naval officer who feigned sleep the moment he knew he was observed. Did she really feel far more than she expressed? She gave him few proofs of it.
She had removed her hat for comfort. Once a fire-fly blew in at the window and settled in her hair. It wandered across her face, lighting up her brows, her lips—each memorized perfection. She raised her hand and brushed it aside. It flew back into the night, leaving behind it a trail of phosphorescence. His need of her was growing cruel.
He gave up his attempt at sleeping. Going out into the corridor, he opened a window and smoked a cigarette. Dawn was breaking. As the light flared and spread, he found that they were traveling a mountainous country. White towns, more Italian than French, gleamed on the crests of sun-baked hills. Roads were white. Rivers looked white. The sky was blue as a sapphire, and smooth as a silken curtain. The fragrance of roses hung in the air. Above the roar of the engine he could hear the cicalas chirping.
At six-thirty, as the train panted into Avignon, she awoke. “Hulloa! Are we there?”
She was so excited that in stepping from the carriage she would have left her hat behind if the naval officer hadn’t reminded her.
They drove through the town to the tinkling of water flowing down the gutters. The streets were narrow, with grated medieval houses rising gray and fortress-like on either side. Great two-wheeled wagons were coming in from the country; their drivers ran beside them, cracking their whips and uttering hoarse cries. All the way she chattered, catching at his lapels and sleeves to attract his attention. She was full of high spirits as a child. She kept repeating scraps of information which she had gathered from the naval officer. “He was quite a gentleman,” she said. And then, when she received no answer, “Didn’t you think that he was very kind?”
In the centre of the town they alighted in a wide square, the Place de la Republique, tree-shadowed, sun-swept, surrounded by public buildings and crooked houses. Carrying their bags, they sat themselves down at a table beneath an awning, and ordered rolls and chocolate.
Frowning over them, a little to their left, was a huge precipice of architecture, rising tower upon tower, embattled against the burning sky. Desire began to retail to him the information she had picked up in the train: how it was the palace of the popes, built by them in the fourteenth century while they were in exile. The source of her knowledge made it distasteful to him. He had difficulty in concealing his irritation. He felt as if he had sand at the back of his eyes. His gaze wandered from her to the women going back and forth through the sunlight, balancing loads on their heads and fetching long loaves of bread from the bakers. Hauntingly at intervals he heard a flute-like music; it was a tune commencing, which at the end of five notes fell silent. A wild-looking herdsman entered the square, followed by twelve black goats. He stood Pan-like and played; advanced a few steps; raised his pipe to his lips and played again. A woman approached him; he called to one of the goats, and squatting on his heels, drew the milk into the woman’s bowl. Through a tunnel leading out of the square, he vanished. Like faery music, his five notes grew fainter, to the accompaniment of sabots clapping across the pavement.
All the while that Desire had been talking, handing on what the stranger had told her about Avignon, he had watched the soul of Avignon wander by, dreamy-eyed and sculptured by the sunlight.
She fell silent. Pushing back her chair, she frowned at him. “I’m doing my best.—I don’t understand you. You’re chilly this morning.”
“Am I?”
“Where’s the good of saying ‘Am I?’ You know you are. What’s the matter? Jealous?”
“Jealous! Hardly.” He stifled a yawn. “I scarcely got a wink of sleep last night. I was keeping an eye on your friend. He was watching you all the time.”
“Then you were jealous.” She leant forward and spoke slowly. “You were rude; you acted like a spoilt child. Why on earth did you go off and glue your nose against the window? You left me to do all the talking.”
Suddenly his anger flamed; he knew that his face had gone set and white. “You didn’t need to talk to him. When are you going to stop playing fast and loose with me? I’ll tell you what it is, Desire: you haven’t any passion.”
He was sorry the moment he had said it. A spark of his resentment caught fire in her eyes. He watched it flicker out. She smiled wearily, “So you think I haven’t any passion!—Oh, well, we’re going to have fine times, now that you’ve begun to criticize.—I’m sleepy. I think I’ll go to bed.”
She rose and strolled away. Leaving his own suit-case at the cafe, he picked up hers and followed. They found a quaint hotel with a courtyard full of blossoming rhododendrons. Running round it, outside the second-story, was a balcony on to which the bedrooms opened. While he was arranging terms in the office, she went to inspect the room that was offered. In a few minutes she sent for her suitcase. He waited half-an-hour; she did not rejoin him.
At the far end of the square he had noticed an old-fashioned hostel. He claimed his baggage at the caf茅, and took a room at the wine-tavern. Having bought a sketching-book, pencils and water-colors, he found the bridge which spans the Rhone between Avignon and Villeneuve. All morning he amused himself making drawings. About every half-hour a ramshackle bus passed him, going and returning. It was no more than boards spread across wheels, with an orange-colored canopy stretched over it. It was drawn by two lean horses, harnessed in with ropes and driven by a girl. He didn’t notice her much at first; the blue river, the white banks, the blue sky, the jagged, vineyard covered hills, and the darting of swallows claimed his attention. It was the bus that he noticed; it creaked and groaned as though it would fall to pieces. Then he saw the girl; she was young and bronzed and laughing. He traced a resemblance in her to Desire—to Desire when she was lenient and happy. She was bare-armed, bare-headed, full-breasted; her hair was black as ebony. She was always singing. About the fifth time in passing him, she smiled. He began to tell himself stories; in Desire’s absence, he watched for her as Desire’s proxy.
At mid-day he went to find Desire; he was told that she was still sleeping. He had d茅jeuner by himself at the caf茅 in the square from which the bus started. When the meal was ended, as he finished his carafe of wine, he made sketches of the girl. When he presented her with one of them, she accepted it from him shyly. His Anglicized French was scarcely intelligible; but after that when she passed him, she smiled more openly.
During the afternoon he called three times at the hotel. Each time he received the same reply, that Mademoiselle was sleeping.
The sky was like an open furnace. Streets were empty. While sketching he had noticed a bathing-house, tethered against the bank below the bridge. He went there to get cool He tried the diving-boards; none of them were high enough. Presently he climbed on to the scorching roof and went off from there. People crossing the bridge stopped to watch him. Once as he was preparing to take the plunge, he saw the orange streak of the old bus creeping across the blue between the girders. He waited till it was just above him. It pulled up. The girl leant out and waved. After that, when he saw the orange streak approaching he waited until it had stopped above him.
The quiet of evening was falling when he again went in search of Desire. This time he was told she had gone out. He left word that he was going to the old Papal Garden, on the rock above the palace, to watch the sunset.
As he climbed the hundred steps of the Escalier de Sainte Anne, which wind round the face of the precipice, the romance of the view that opened out before him took away his breath. He felt injured and angry that she was not there to share it. He went over the details of the first day in Paris. It had been a fiasco; this day had been worse.
If ever he were to marry her—— For the first time he realized that winning her was not everything.
Near the top of the ascent, where a gateway spanned the path, he halted. A fig-tree leant across the wall, heavy with fruit that was green and purple. Behind him from a rock a spring rushed and gurgled. He stooped across the parapet, gazing down into the town. It wasn’t aloof like New York, nor sullen like London. It was a woman lifting her arms behind her head and laughing lazily through eyes half-shut.
Against the sweep of encircling distance, mountains lay blue and smoking. A faint pinkness spread across the country like a blush. White walls and hillsides were tinted to salmon-color. The sunset drained the red from the tiles of house-tops. Plane-trees, peeping above gray masonry, looked clear and deep as wells. The Rhone wound about the city walls like a gold and silver spell.
Now that coolness had come, shutters began to open. The murmur of innumerable sounds floated up. A breeze whispered through the valley like the voice of yearning. It seemed that behind those windows girls were preparing to meet their lovers. And the other women, the women who were too old or too cold to love! He thought of them.
Suddenly his eyes were covered from behind by two hands. He struggled to remove them; then he felt that they were slender and young.
“Who are you?”
Silence.
He repeated his question in French.
The hands slipped from his eyes to his shoulders. “Well, you’re a nice one! Who should it be? It’s the last time I allow you to play by yourself.”
He swung round and caught her fiercely, shaking her as he pressed her to him.
“Don’t, Meester Deek. You hurt.”
His lips were within an inch of hers; he didn’t try to kiss her. “You leave me alone all day,” he panted; “and then you make a joke of it.”
She drew her fingers down his face. “I was very tired, and—and we weren’t good-tempered. I’ve been lonely, too.” She laid her cheek against his mouth. “Come, kiss me, Meester Deek. You look as though you weren’t ever going to.—I’m glad, so glad that——”
“That what?”
She held her hand against her mouth and laughed into his eyes. “That you haven’t enjoyed yourself without me.”
They climbed to the top of the rock. In the sun-baked warmness of the garden cicalas were still singing. In the town lights were springing up. The after-glow lingered on the mountains. Beneath trees the evening lay silver as moonlight. From a fountain in the middle of a pool rose the statue of Venus aux Hirondelles.
His arm was still about her. Every few paces he stopped to kiss her. She patted his face and drew it close to hers. “You’re foolish,” she whispered. “You spoil me. You’re always nicest when I’ve been my worst.”
Then she commenced to ask him questions. “Do you really think that I’ve not got any passion?—If I’d been scarred in that motor-car accident, would you still love me?—Mrs. Theodore Gurney! It does sound funny. I wonder if I’ll ever be called that.”
It was during the descent to the town that she made him say that he was glad she had quarreled with him.
“Well, I do make it up to you afterwards, don’t I? If we hadn’t quarreled, you wouldn’t be doing what you are now. No, you wouldn’t I shouldn’t allow it. And please don’t try to kiss me just here; it’s so joggly. Last time you caught the brim of my hat.”
They had dinner in the courtyard of her hotel, in the sweet, earthy dusk of the rhododendrons. It was like a stage-setting: the canopy of the sky with the stars sailing over them; the golden panes of windows; the shadows of people passing and re-passing; the murmur of voices; the breathless whisper of far-off footsteps. At another table a black-bearded Frenchman sat and watched them.
“I wish he wouldn’t look at us,” Desire said. “I wonder why he does.”
They took a final walk before going to bed. In the courtyard where the bushes grew densest, they parted. When he kissed her, she drooped her face against his shoulder. “Give me your lips.”
She shook her head.
A tone of impatience crept into his voice. “Why not? You’ve done it before. Why not now?”
He tried to turn her lips towards him; she took away his hand.
“I don’t know. I’m odd. I don’t feel like it.”
He let her go. Again the flame of anger swept through him. “Will you ever feel like it?”
“How can I tell—now?”
“You’ve never once kissed me. Any other girl——”
“I’m not any other girl.” And then, “We’re alone. I’ve got to be wise for both of us.”
She ran from him. In the doorway of the hotel she turned and kissed the tips of her fingers.
He seated himself at a table, watching for the light to spring up in her window. It was just possible that she might relent and come back, or that she might lean over the balcony and wave to him While he waited, the bearded Frenchman slipped out from the shadow. He approached and raised his hat formally.
“Monsieur, I understand that you are not stopping at this hotel.”
“No, but I have a friend——”
“Mademoiselle, who has just gone from you?’
“Yes.”
“Then let me tell you, Monsieur, that there is a place near here that will cure you of the illness from which you suffer.” The man took a card from his pocket and commenced to scribble on it.
“But I’m not suffering from any——”
“Ah, then, it will cure mademoiselle.”
The man laid his card on the table, and again raised his hat
By the time Teddy had recovered from his surprise, the stranger had vanished. He hurried into the street and gazed up and down. When he returned to the courtyard. Desire’s window was in darkness. Picking up the card, he struck a match and read the words, “Les Baux.” What was Les Baux? Where was it? He fell asleep thinking of the miracle that had been promised; when he awoke next morning he was still thinking of it. As he dressed he heard the five faint notes of the goatman. Life had become fantastic. Perhaps——
He set about making inquiries. It was a ruined city in the hills he discovered. Oh, yes, there had been several books written about it and innumerable poems. It had been a nest of human eagles once—the home of troubadours. It was the place where the Queens of Beauty and the Courts of Love had started. It was said that if a lover could persuade a reluctant girl to go there with him, she would prove no longer reluctant It was only a superstition; of course Monsieur understood that Monsieur hurried to purchase a guide-book to Les Baux. While he waited among the rhododendrons for Desire, he read it Then he looked up time-tables and found that the pleasantest way to go was from Arles, and that from there one had to drive a half day’s journey.
Desire surprised him at his investigations. She was all in white, with a pink sash about her waist, her dress turned bade deeply at the neck for coolness and her arms bare to die elbow. She looked extremely young and pretty.
“’Ulloa, old dear!” she cried, bursting into Cockney. She peered over his shoulder. “What are you doing?”
“Looking up routes.”
“Routes!” She raised her brows.
“Yes. To Les Baux.”
“You’re not going to get me out of here, old dear. Don’t you think it We’ve not seen Avignon yet.”
“But Les Baux——”
Quoting from the guide-book, he commenced to explain to her its excellences and beauties. She smiled, obstinately repeating, “We’ve not seen Avignon yet.”
It was after they had breakfasted, when they were crossing the square, that the bus-girl nodded to him.
“Who’s she?”
“A girl. Don’t you think she’s like you?”
Desire tossed her head haughtily, but slipped her arm into his to show that she owned him. “Like me, indeed! You’re flattering!”
Presently she asked, “What did you do all yesterday, while I was horrid?”
“Sat on the bridge and sketched.”
“Sketched! I never saw you sketch. If you’ll buy me a parasol to match my sash, I’ll sit beside you to-day and watch you.”
On the bridge he set to work upon a water-color of the Rhone as it flowed past Villeneuve. She was going over his drawings. Suddenly she stopped. She had come across three of the same person. Just then the orange-bus lumbered by; again the girl laughed at him.
“Look here, Meester Deek, you’ve got to tell me everything that you did when I wasn’t with you.”
He was too absorbed in his work to notice what had provoked her curiosity. When he came to the account of his bathing, she interrupted him. “I want to see you bathe.”
“All right, presently.”
“No. Now.”
He rather liked her childish way of ordering him. He spoke lazily. “I don’t mind, if you’ll take care of—— I say, this is like Long Beach, isn’t it? You made me bathe there. But promise you won’t slip off while I’m gone.”
“Honest Injun, I promise.”
He had climbed to the roof of the bathing-house and was straightening himself for the plunge, when he heard the creaking of the bus approaching. He looked up. The bus-girl had alighted and was leaning down from the bridge, waving to him. Before diving, he waved back. When he had climbed to the roof again, he searched round for Desire. She was nowhere to be found.
He dressed quickly. At the hotel he was informed that she was packing. He called up to her window from the courtyard. She came out on to the balcony.
“They tell me you’re packing. What——”
“Going to Les Baux,” she said, “or any other old place. I won’t stay another hour in Avignon.”
“But this morning at breakfast——”
“I know.” She frowned. As she reentered her window, she glanced back across her shoulder. “I didn’t know as much about Avignon then.”
Arles was little more than an hour’s journey. It was noon when they left Avignon. He had been fortunate in getting an empty compartment Without any coaxing, she came and sat herself beside him. When the train had started, she took off her hat and leant her head against his shoulder.
“Did you do that on purpose to make me mad?”
“Do what on purpose?”
She played with his hand. “You know, Meester Deck. Don’t pretend. You did it first with the grisette in the Luxembourg, and now here with that horrid bus-girl. If you do it a third time, you’ll have me making a little fool of myself.”
He burst out laughing. She was jealous; she cared for him. He had infected her with his own uncertainty.
“A nasty, masterful laugh,” she pouted.
He at once became repentant. “I only noticed her when I was lonely,” he excused himself; “I thought she was like you.”
Desire screwed up her mouth thoughtfully. “Then I’ll have to keep you from being lonely.”
She tilted up her face. He pressed her lips gently at first; then fiercely. They did not stir. “That’s enough.” She strained back from him. “Be careful Remember what you told me—that I haven’t any passion.”
“You have.”
“But you said I hadn’t.”
Her strength went from her and he drew her to him. “The fourth time,” he whispered.
“When were the others?”
“That day up the Hudson when I asked you to marry me.”
“And the next?”
“At the apartment, when we said good-by across the stairs.”
“How long ago it all sounds! And the third?”
“On Christmas Eve. Princess, I’m going to kiss your lips whenever I like now.”
She slanted her eyes at him. “Are you? See if you can.”
Her cheeks were flushed. Slipping her finger into her mouth, she pretended to thwart him. She lay in his arms, happy and unresisting—a little amused.
“When are you going to kiss me back?”
She laughed into his eyes like a witch woman. “Ah, when? You’re greedy—never contented. I’ve given you so much.”
“I shall never be contented till——”
She flattened her palm against his lips to silence him.
“Didn’t I tell you that my niceness would commence quite suddenly? I can be nicer than this.” She nodded. “I can. And I can be a little pig again presently—especially if we meet another naval officer. I’m always liable to—”
“Not if you’re in love with any one,” he pleaded.
She sighed. “I’m afraid I am, Meester—Meester Teddy.” She barricaded her lips with her hand. “No more. Do be good. I’ve got to be wise for both of us. I suppose you think I was jealous? I wasn’t.”
As the train drew near Arles, she made him release her. His heart was beating fast. Producing a pocket-mirror, she inspected herself. For the moment she seemed entirely forgetful of him. Then, “Tell me about this old Les Baux place,” she commanded.
The engine halted. He helped her out. “It’s a surprise. You’ll see for yourself.”
On making inquiries, they found that the drive was so long that they would have to start at once to arrive by evening. To save time, they took their lunch with them—grapes, wine and cakes. When the town was left behind, they commenced to picnic in the carriage. They had only one bottle, from which they had to drink in turns. She played a game of feeding him, slipping grapes into his mouth. They had to keep a sharp eye on the cocher, who was very particular that they should miss none of the landmarks. When he turned to attract their attention, pointing with his whip, they straightened their faces and became very proper. After he had twice caught them, Desire said, “He’ll think we’re married now, so we may as well deceive him.”
Teddy was allowed to place an arm about her, while she held the parasol over them.
“If we were really married, d’you think you’d let me smoke a cigarette?”
He lit one and, having drawn a few puffs, edged it between her lips.
“You are good to me,” she murmured; “you save me so much trouble.”
The fierce sun of Provence blazed down on them. A haze hung over the country, making everything tremble. Cicalas chirped more drowsily. The white straight road looked molten. Plane-trees, stretching on in an endless line, seemed to crouch beneath their shadows. The air was full of the fragrance of wild lavender. Farmhouses which they passed were silent and shuttered. No life moved between the osier partitions of their gardens. Even birds were in hiding. Only lizards were awake and darted like a flash across rocks which would have scorched the hand. Beneath a wild fig-tree a mule-driver slumbered, his face buried in his arms and his bare feet thrust outward. It was a land enchanted.
Desire grew silent. Her head drooped nearer to his shoulder. Beads of moisture began to glisten on her throat and forehead. Once or twice she opened her eyes, smiling dreamily up at him; then her breath came softly and she slept.
At Saint R茅my they stopped to water the horse. The first coolness of evening was spreading. As the breeze fluttered down the hills, trees shuddered, like people rising from their beds. Shutters were being pushed back from windows. Faces peered out Loiterers gazed curiously at the carriage, with the unconscious girl drooping like a flower in the arms of the gravely defiant young man. Saint R茅my had been left behind; the ascent into the mountains had commenced before she wakened.
She rubbed her eyes and sat up. “What! Still holding me? I do think you’re the most patient man—— Do you still love me, Meester Deek?”
He stooped to kiss her yawning mouth. “More every hour. But why?”
“Because if a man can still love a woman after seeing her asleep—— When I’m asleep, I don’t look my prettiest.”
The scenery was becoming momentarily more wild. The horse was laboring in its steps. On either side white bowlders hung as if about to tumble. The narrow road wound up through the loneliness in sweeping curves. Hawks were dipping against the sky. Not a tree was in sight—only wild lavender and straggling furze.
She clutched his arm. “It’s frightening.”
“Let’s walk ahead and not think about it,” he suggested. “We’ll talk and forget.”
But the scenery proved silencing.
“Do say something,” she whispered. “Can’t we quarrel? We’ll talk if we’re angry.”
He thought. “What kind of a beast was that man in California?”
“He wasn’t a beast. He was quite nice. You came near seeing him.”
“I did! When?”
“He was the man who was stopping in Paris at my hotel.—There, now you’re really angry! That’s the worst of telling anything. A woman should keep all her faults to herself.”
“And he saw us?”
She stared at him, surprised at his intuition. “How long have you known that?”
They were entering a tunnel hewn between rocks; they rose up scarred and forbidding, nearly meeting overhead.
She shuddered. “I wish we hadn’t come. It’s——”
Suddenly, like a guilty conscience left behind, the tunnel opened on to a platform. Far below lay a valley, trumpet-shaped and widening as it faded into the distance. It was snow-white with lime-stone, and flecked here and there with blood-red earth. The sides of the hills were monstrous cemeteries, honeycombed with troglodyte dwellings. In the plain, like naked dancing girls with flying hair, olive-trees fluttered. Rocks, strewn through the greenness, seemed hides stretched out to dry. Men, white as lepers, were crawling to and fro in the lime-stone quarries. Straight ahead, cleaving the valley with its shadow, rose a sheer column—a tower of Babel, splintered by the sunset. As they gazed across the gulf to its summit, they made out roofs and ivy-spattered ramparts. It looked deserted. Then across the distance from the ethereal height the chiming of bells sounded.
He drew her to him. It was as though with one last question, he was putting all their doubts behind. “Was it true about that man?”
“Quite true. Fluffy gave him my address. Let’s forget him now, and—and everything.”
As he stooped above her, she whispered, “Meester Deek, our quarrels have brought us nearer.”
They heard the rattle of the carriage in the tunnel. Joining hands, they set out down the steep decline. In the valley they found themselves among laurel-roses, pink with bloom and heavy with fragrance. Then they commenced the climb to Les Baux, through cypresses standing stiffly as sentinels. Beady-eyed, half-naked children watched them and hid behind rocks when they beckoned.
Beneath a battered gateway they entered the ancient home of the Courts of Love. Near the gateway, built flush with the precipice, stood a little house which announced that it was the H么tel de la Reine Jeanne. An old gentleman with eyes like live coals and long white hair, stepped out to greet them. He informed them that he was the folk-lore poet of Les Baux and its inn-keeper. They engaged rooms; while doing so they noticed that many of the walls were covered with frescoes.
“Ah, yes,” said the poet inn-keeper, “an English artist did them in payment for his board when he had spent all his money. He came here like you, you understand; intending to stay for one night; but he stayed forever. It has happened before in Les Baux, this becoming enchanted. He was a very famous artist, but he works in the vineyards now and has married one of our Saracen girls.”
Then he explained that Les Baux was like a pool front which the tides of Time had receded. Its inhabitants were descendants of Roman legionaries and of the Saracens who had conquered it later. That was why there were no blue eyes in Les Baux, though it stood so near to heaven.
They wandered out into the charmed silence. There was no wheel-traffic. The toy streets could be spanned by the arms outstretched. There were no shops—only deserted palaces, with defaced escutcheons and wall-flowers nestling in their crannies. Only women and children were in sight; they looked like camp-followers of a lost army. Old imperial splendors moldered in this sepulchre of the clouds, as out of mind as the Queens of Beauty asleep in their leaden coffins.
They came to the part that was Roman. Cicalas and darting swallows were its sole tenants. From the huge structure of the crag houses had been carved and hollowed. The pavement was still grooved by the wheels of chariots.
In Paris it had been the foreignness of their surroundings that had forced them together; now it was the antiquity—the brooding sense of the eventlessness of life and the eternal tedium of expectant death.
“A doll’s house of the gods,” he said.
“No, a faery land waiting for its princess to waken.”
He folded her hands together and held them against his breast. “She will never waken till her lips have kissed a man.”
She peered up at him shyly. Her face quivered. She had a hunted indecision in her eyes. The clamor, as of feet pounding through her body, communicated itself through her hands. She tore them from him. “Don’t touch me.” She ran from him wildly, and did not stop till streets where people lived commenced.
When he had come up with her, she tried to cover her confusion with laughter. “You remember what he said about becoming enchanted? It nearly happened to us.”
“And why not?”
“Because——” She shrugged her shoulders.
In their absence a table had been spread on the terrace and a lamp placed on it as a beacon. By reaching out from where they sat, they could gaze sheer down through the twilight. Night, like a blue vapor, was steaming up from the valley. In the shadows behind, they were vaguely aware that the town had assembled to watch them. Bare feet pattered. A girl laughed. Now and then a mandolin tinkled, and a love-song of Provence drifted up like a perfume flung into the poignant dusk. At intervals the sentinel in the church-tower gave warning how time was forever passing.
“You were afraid of me; that was why you ran.”
She lowered her eyes. “I was more afraid of myself.—Meester Deek, you’ve never tried to understand what sort of a girl I am. Everything that I’ve seen of life, right from the very start, has taught me to be a coward—to believe that the world is bad. Don’t you see how I’d drag you down? It’s because of that—— When I feel anything big and terrible I run from it. It—it seems safer.”
“But you can’t run away forever.” He leant across the table and took her hand. “One day you’ll want those big and terrible things and—and a man to protect you. They won’t come to you then, perhaps.”
She lifted her face and gazed at him. “You mean you wouldn’t wait always? Of course you wouldn’t. You don’t know it, but if I were to go away to-morrow, your waiting would end.”
“It wouldn’t.”
“It would. A girl’s instinct tells her. And I ought to go.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I’m not the wife for you. I’ve given you far more misery than happiness.”
He laughed quietly. “Little sweetheart, if you were to go, I should follow you and follow you.”
She shook her head. “Not far.—Meester Deek, some day you may learn to hate me, so I want to tell you: until I met you, I believed the worst of every man. I was a little stream in a wilderness; I wanted so to find the sea, and it seemed that I never should. But now——”
His clasp on her hand tightened. “But now?”
She looked at him sadly. “I should spoil your whole life. Would you spoil your whole life for the kind of girl I am?”
“Gladly.”
She smiled wistfully. “I wonder how many women have been loved like that.”
They rose. “Shall we go in?”
“Not yet,” he pleaded.
“It would be better.”
As they were crossing the terrace, the cocher approached them. He wanted to know at what hour they proposed to leave next morning. He was anxious to start early, before the heat of the day had commenced.
“I don’t think we’re leaving.” Teddy glanced at Desire. Then, with a rush of decision: “We’re planning to stay a day or two longer. It’ll be all the same to you; I’ll pay for the return journey.”
Saying that he would be gone before they were out of bed, the man bade them farewell.
When they had entered the darkness of the narrow streets, he put his arm about her. She came to him reluctantly; then surrendered and leant against him heavily. They sauntered silently as in a dream. All the steps which had led up to this moment passed before him: her evasions and retractions. She was no longer a slave of freedom. For the first time he felt certain of her; with the certainty came an overwhelming sense of gratitude and tranquillity. He feared lest by word or action he should disturb it, and it should go from him.
They passed by the old palaces perfumed with wallflowers; in a window an occasional light winked at them. They reached the Roman part of the town and hurried their steps. By contrast it seemed evil and ghost-haunted; through the caves that had been houses, bats flew in and out A soft wind met them. They felt the turf beneath their tread and stepped out on to the ruined battlements. Wild thyme mingled with the smell of lavender. The memory of forsaken gardens and forgotten ecstasies was in the air. Three towers, Roman, Saracen and French, pointed mutilated fingers at eternity. They halted, drinking in the silence, and lifted their eyes to the stars wheeling overhead. Far away, through mists across the plain, Marseilles struck sparks on the horizon and the moon rose red.
She turned in his embrace. “I’m not half as sweet as you would make me out, I’m not. Oh, won’t you believe me?”
His tranquillity gave way; he caught her to him, raining kisses on her throat, her eyes, her mouth.
“You’re crushing me!” Her breath came stifled and sobbing.
Tenderness stamped out his passion. As his grip relaxed, she slipped from him. She was running; he followed. On the edge of the precipice, the red moon swinging behind her like a lantern, she halted. Her hands were held ready to thrust him back.
“It would be better for you that I should throw myself down than—than——”
He seized her angrily and drew her roughly to him. “You little fool,” he panted.
With a sudden abandon she urged herself against him. As he bent over her, her arms reached up and her lips fell warm against his mouth.
“I do love you. I do. I do,” she whispered. “Take care of me. Be good to me. I daren’t trust myself.”
The hotel was asleep when they got back. They fumbled their way up the crooked stairs. Outside her room, as in the darkness they clung together, she took his face between her hands. “And you said I hadn’t any passion!—You’re good, Meester Deck. God bless you.”
Her door closed. He waited. He heard the lock turn.
“When I kiss you without your asking me, you’ll know then,” she had said. His heart sang. All night, in his dreaming and waking, he was making plans.
When he came down next morning, he found the table spread on the terrace. He walked over to it, intending while he waited for her, to sit down and smoke a cigarette. One place had been already used. He hadn’t known that another guest had been staying at the hotel. Calling the inn-keeper, he asked him to have the place reset.
“But for whom?”
“For Mademoiselle.”
“Mademoiselle! But Mademoiselle——” The man looked blank. “But Mademoiselle, a six hours she left this morning with the carriage.”
Now that she had gone from him, he realized how mistaken he had been in his chivalry. From the first, instead of begging, he ought to have commanded. She was a girl with whom it paid to be rough. It was only on the precipice, when he had seized her savagely, that her passion had responded. In the light of what had happened, her last words seemed a taunt—an echo of her childish despising of King Arthurs: “And you said I hadn’t any passion I—You’re good, Meester Deek.” Had he been less honorable in her hour of weakness, he would still have had her.
“That ends it!” he told himself. Nevertheless he set out hot-footed for Arles. There he hunted up the cocher who had driven them to Les Baux, and learnt that she had taken train for Paris. In Paris he inquired at The Oxford and Cambridge. He searched the registers of a dozen hotels. Tramping the boulevards of the city of lovers, he revisited all the places where they had been together; he hoped that a whim of sentiment might lead her on the same errand.
A new thought struck him: she had written to Eden Row and his mother didn’t know his address. All the time that he had been wasting in this intolerable aloneness her explanation had been waiting for him. He returned posthaste, only to be met with her unconquerable silence. He hurried to Orchid Lodge; her father might know her whereabouts. There he was told that Hal had sailed for New York—with what motive he could guess. This lent the final derisive touch to his tragedy.
It was the end of July, nearly a year to the day since he had made his great discovery at Glastonbury. He had spent a month of torture. Since the key had turned in her lock at the H么tel de la Reine Jeanne, he had had no sign of her. He came down to breakfast one sunshiny morning; lying beside his plate was a letter in her hand. He slipped it into his pocket with feigned carelessness, till he should be alone; then he opened it and read:
Dearest Teddy:
I need you.
Savoy Hotel,
The Strand.
Come at once.
Your foolish Desire.
She needed him! It was the first time she had owned as much. From her that admission in three words was more eloquent than many pages. Had her slavery to freedom become irksome? Had it got her into trouble?
He reached the Savoy within the hour. As he passed his card across the desk he was a-tremble. It was a relief when the clerk gave him no bad news but, having phoned up, turned and said, “The lady will see you in her room, sir.”
The passage outside her door was piled with trunks; painted on them, like an advertisement, in conspicuous white letters, was Janice Audrey. He tapped. As he waited he heard laughter. In his high-wrought state of nerves the sound was an offense.
The handle turned. “Hulloa, Teddy! I’ve heard about you. I’m going to leave you two scatter-brains to yourselves.”
Fluffy was in her street-attire—young, eager and caparisoned for conquest. She seemed entirely unrelated to the shuddering Diana in the Tyrolese huntsman’s costume, whom he had last seen breaking her heart in the dressing-room of The Belshazzar. He stepped aside to let her pass; then he entered.
He found himself in a large sunlit room in a riot of disorder—whether with packing or unpacking it was difficult to tell. Evidently some one had gone through a storm of shopping. Frocks were strewn in every direction; opera-cloaks and evening-gowns lay on the floor, on the bed, on the backs of chairs. Hats were half out of milliners’ boxes. Shoes and slippers lay jumbled in a pile in a suit-case. It was fitting that he and Desire should meet again in a hired privacy, like transients.
She stood against a wide window, looking down on the Embankment She was wearing a soft green peignoir trimmed with daisies. It was almost transparent, so that in the strong sunlight her slight figure showed through it It was low-cut and clinging—a match in color to the Guinevere costume which she had been wearing when he had discovered her at Glastonbury. Had she intended that it should waken memories? As he watched he was certain that that had been her intention, for she was adorned with another reminder: a false curl had usurped the place of the old one she had given him. It danced against her neck, quivering with excitement, and seemed to beckon.
Her back was towards him. She must have heard Fluffy speaking to him. She must know that he was on the threshold. He closed the door quietly and halted.
“Meester Deek, are you glad to see me?” She spoke without turning. \
Her question went unanswered. In the silence it seemed to repeat itself maddeningly. She drummed with her fingers on the pane, as though insisting that until he had answered he should not see her face.
At last her patience gave out She glanced across her shoulder. Something in his expression warned her. Running to him, she caught his hands and pressed against him, laughing into his eyes. She waited submissively for his arms to enfold her. When he remained unmoved, she whispered luringly, “I’m as amiable as I ever shall be.”
“Are you?”
She pouted. “Once if I’d told you that——
“Are you!”
“Is that all after a whole month?”
“A whole month!” His face seemed set in a mask. “To me it has seemed a century.”
For the first time she dimly realized what he had suffered. She drew her fingers across his cheek. Her hands ran over him like white mice. The weariness in his way of talking frightened her. “I’m—I’m sorry that I’m not always nice. It wasn’t quite nice of me to leave you, was it?”
His lips grew crooked at her understatement “From my point of view it wasn’t.”
She thought for a moment; she was determined not to acknowledge that he was altered. Slipping her arm into his comfortably, she led him across the room. “Let’s sit down. I’ve so much to tell you.”
He helped her to push a couch to the window that they might shut out the sight of the room’s disorder. When she had seated herself in a corner, she patted the place beside her. He sat himself at the other end and gazed out at the gray-gold stretch of river, where steamers churned back and forth between Greenwich and Westminster.
“Fluffy’s going to America; we ran over from Paris to get some clothes. It’s all rubbish to get one’s clothes in Paris; London’s just as good and not one-half as expensive. She has to return to Paris in a day or two to see a play. Simon Freelevy thinks it will suit her. After that she sails from Cherbourg.—Meester Deek, are you interested in Fluffy’s doings?”
“I was looking at the river. I scarcely heard what you were saying.”
“Well, then, perhaps this will interest you. She says that, if I like, she’ll see that I get a place in her company at The Belshassar.—Still admiring the view?—I wish you’d answer me sometimes, Teddy.”
“So you’re going to become another Fluffy?”
Her tone sank to a honeyed sweetness. “You’re most awfully far away. If you don’t come nearer, we might just as well——”
“As I came along the passage,” he said, “I heard you laughing. I haven’t done much laughing lately.”
A frown crept into her eyes. “That was because I was going to see you.”
He wished he could believe her.
In a desperate effort to win him to pleasantness, she closed up the space that separated them. His coldness piqued her. Through her filmy garment her body touched him; it was burning. “And I—I haven’t done much laughing lately, either; but one can’t be always tragic.” Her voice was tremulous and sultry. She brushed against him and peered into his face reproachfully. “You aren’t very sympathetic.”
“Not very.”
She tried the effect of irritation. “I wish you wouldn’t keep on catching at what I say.” Then, with a return to her sweetness: “Do be kind, Meester Deck. You don’t know how badly I need you.”
Something deep and emotional stirred within him. Perhaps it was memory—perhaps habit All his life he had been waiting for just that—for her to need him; it had begun years ago when Hal had told him of the price that she would have to pay. Perhaps it was love struggling in the prison that her indifference had created for it It might be merely the sex response to her closeness.
“I came because you wrote that you needed me. But your laughing and the way you met me——”
“I was nervous and—and you don’t know why.”
He shook his head. “After all that’s happened, after all the loneliness and all the silence—— My dear, I don’t know what’s the matter with me; I think you’ve killed something. I’m not trying to be unkind.”
She crouched her face in her hands. At last she became earnest “And just when I need you!”
“Tell me,” he urged gravely; “I’ll do anything.”
“You promise—really anything?”
“Anything.”
She smiled mysteriously, making bars of her fingers before her eyes. She knew that, however he might deny it, he was again surrendering to her power. “Even if I were to ask you to marry me?”
“Anything,” he repeated, without fervor.
“Then I’ll ask a little thing first.” She hesitated. “It would help if you put your arm about me.”
He carried out her request perfunctorily.
“Ask me questions,” she whispered; “it will be easier to begin like that.”
“Where did you go when you left me?”
“To Paris.”
“I know. I followed you.”
She started. “But you didn’t see me?”
He kept her in suspense, while he groped after the reason for her excitement. “No. I didn’t see you. Whom were you with?”
“Fluffy.”
“Any one else?”
“Yes.” She caught at his hands, as though already he had made a sign to leave her. “I didn’t know he was to be there.”
“Ah!” He knew whom she meant: the man with whom she had flirted in California and whom a strange chance had led to her hotel in Paris. He would have withdrawn his arm if she had not held it.
“But none of this explains your leaving me and then not writing.”
A hardness had crept into his tones. His jealousy had sprung into a flame. He remembered those photographs of Tom in her bedroom. There had always been other men at the back of her life. How did he know whom she met or what she did, when he was away from her?
“Meester Deek,” she clutched at him, “don’t You—you frighten me. I’ve done nothing wrong. I haven’t I’ve spent every moment with Fluffy.”
“That didn’t keep you from writing.”
“No.” She laid her face against his pleadingly. “That didn’t prevent It was—— Oh, Meester Deek, won’t you understand—you’ve always been so unjudging? At Les Baux that night you wakened something—something that I’d never felt. I didn’t dare to trust myself. It wasn’t you that I distrusted. I wanted to go somewhere alone—somewhere where I could think and come to myself. If I’d written to you, or received letters from you——”
“Desire, let’s speak the truth. We promised always to be honest You say you went with Fluffy to be alone; you know you didn’t. Fluffy’s never alone—she’s a queen bee with the drones always buzzing round her. You went away to get rid of me, and for the fun of seeing whether you could recall me.”
“Not that. Truly not that” She paused and drew a long breath, like a diver getting ready for a deep plunge. “It was because I was afraid that, if I stopped longer, we might have to marry. A girl may be cold—she mayn’t even love a man, but if she trifles too long with his affections, she herself sometimes catches fire. That was how my mother—with my father.”
“Then why did you send for me?” His tone was stern and puzzled.
For a time she was silent. It seemed to him that she was searching for a plausible motive. Then, “I think because I wanted to see a good man.”
He tried to smile cynically. She had fooled him too many times for him to allow himself to be caught so easily as that. The scales had fallen from his eyes. She had always made whatever uprightness he possessed a reproach to him.
“You don’t believe me?” She scanned his face wistfully. “You never did understand me or—or any girls.”
The new argument which her accusation suggested was tempting; no man, however inexperienced, likes to be told that he is ignorant of women. That he refused to allow himself to be diverted was proof to her of her loss of power.
“I believe you in a sense,” he said. “I don’t doubt that at this moment you imagine that you want to see a good man—not that I’m especially good; I’m just decent and ordinary. But you’re not really interested in good men; you don’t find them exciting. Long ago, as children, you told me that. Don’t you remember—I like Sir Launcelot best?”
She twisted her hands. Her face had gone white. When she spoke her voice was earnest and tired. “You force me to tell you.—I did want to see a good man—a good man who loved me. You’ll never guess why. It was to get back my self-respect That man—that man whom I led on in California, he saw us together in Paris. He misunderstood. He thought vile things. After I’d left you and joined Fluffy, I met him again and he asked me to be—— I can’t say it; but when a man like that misunderstands things about a girl——” Self-scorn consumed her. “It wasn’t only because he’d seen us together—it wasn’t only that.” Her voice sank to a bitter whisper. “I’m the daughter of a woman who was never married—he found that out; so he asked me to become his——”
“My God! Don’t say it.”
He tried to draw her to him. Tears blinded his eyes. She scoffed at herself rebelliously. “It’s true. I deserved it That’s the way I act—like a man’s mistress. I don’t act like other girls. That’s why you never mentioned me in your letters from New York to your mother. You made excuses for me in your own mind, and you tried not to be ashamed of me and, because you were chivalrous, you were sorry for me. I hated you for being sorry. But men, like that man in Paris—all they see in me is an opportunity——”
“The swine!” He clenched his hands and sat staring at the carpet.
“No.” She shook her head sadly. “I’m fair game. I see it all now. I used to think I was only modern, and used to laugh at you for being old-fashioned. You were always trying to tell me. I’m taking back everything unkind that I ever did or said. D’you hear me, Teddy? It’s the way I’ve been brought up. I’m what Horace calls ‘a Slave of freedom.’ I fascinate and I don’t play fair. I’m rotten and I’m virtuous. I accept and accept with my greedy little hands. I lead men on to expect, and I give nothing.”
She waited for him to say something—something healing and generous—perhaps that he would marry her. He was filled with pity and with doubt—and with another emotion. What she had told him had roused his passion. In memory he could feel the warmth of her body. Why had she dressed like this to meet him? Why did she touch him so frequently? Passion wasn’t love; it would burn itself out He knew that, if he stayed, he would shatter the idol she had created of him. He would become like that man whom he had been despising.
His silence disappointed her. She ceased from caressing him. She had come to an end of all her arts and blandishments. In trying to be sincere, she had made her very sincerity sound like coquetry. She realized that this man, who had been absolutely hers at a time when she had not valued him, had grown reserved and cautious at this crisis when she needed him more than anything in the world. A desperate longing came into her eyes. Struggling with her pride, in one last effort to win him back, she stretched out her arms timidly, resting her hands on his shoulders with a tugging pressure. “I guess,” her voice came brokenly, “I guess you’re the only living man who would ever have dreamt of marrying me.”
Jumping up, he seized his hat
“You’re going?”
He faced her furiously. It seemed to him that he was gazing into a furnace. “If I stay, you’ll have me kissing you.”
She scarcely knew whether she loved or hated him, yet she held out her arms to him languorously. For a moment he hesitated. Then he hurried past her. As his hand was on the door, he heard a thud. She had fallen to her knees beside the couch in the sunlight Her face was buried in her hands.
Slowly he came back. Stooping over her, he brushed his lips against her hair.
She lifted her sad eyes. “I tried to be fair to you; I warned you. You should have stuck to your dream of me. You were never in love with the reality.”
“I was.” He denied her vehemently.
She smiled wearily. “The past tense! Will you ever be kind to me again, I wonder? I—I never had a father, Teddy.”
The old excuse—the truest of all her excuses! It struck the chord of memory. He picked her up gently, holding her so closely that he could feel the shuddering of her breath.
“In spite of everything,” she whispered, “would you still marry me?”
He faltered. “Yes, I’d still marry you. But, Desire, we’ve forgotten: you haven’t told me truly why you sent for me.”
She slipped from his arms and put the couch between them. “I sent for you to tell you that—that I’m that, though I’ve tried, I can’t live without you.”
He leant out to touch her. She avoided him. “First tell me that you love me.”
“I do.”
Her gray eyes brimmed over. “You don’t. You’re lying. I’ve never lied to you—with all my faults I’ve never done that.”
His arms fell to his side. When confronted by her truth his passion went from him. “But I shall. I shall love you, Desire. It’ll all come back.”
She shook her head. “It might never. And without it—— You told me that I’d killed something. I believe I have.”
“If you would only let me kiss you,” he pleaded.
She darted across the room and flinging wide the door, waited for him in the passage.
She took his hands in hers. They gazed at each other inarticulately.
“I can’t tell you—can’t tell you,” he panted. “All the time I may be loving you.”
“And just when I needed you, Meester Deek,” she whispered, “just when I want to be good so badly!”
She broke from him. Again, as at Les Baux, he heard the key in her lock turning.
No sooner was he without her than the change commenced. During his month of intolerable waiting, when he had thought that he had lost her forever, he had tried to heal the affront to his pride with a dozen hostile arguments. He had persuaded himself that the break with her was for the best. He had told himself that carelessness towards men was in her blood—a taint of sexlessness inherited from her mother. He had assured himself repeatedly that he could live without her. He had fixed in his mind as a goal to be envied his old pursuits, with their unfevered touch of bachelor austerity. This had been his mood till he had received her message: “I need you. Come at once.”
Having seen her, his yearning had returned like a lean wolf the more famished by reason of its respite. Was it love? If he lied to her, she would detect him. Until he could convince her that he loved her, he was exiled by her honesty. He knew now that throughout the weeks of waiting his suffering had been dulled by its own intensity. His false self-poise had been a symptom of the malady.
All day he tramped the streets of London in the scorching heat of midsummer. He went up the Strand and back by the Embankment, round and round, taking no time for food or rest. He felt throughout his body a continual vibration, an eager trembling. He dared not go far from her.
In spirit she was never absent She rose up crouching her chin against her shoulder and barricading her lips with her hand. He relived their many partings—the ecstasies, kisses, wavings down the stairs—those prolonged poignant moments when her tenderness had atoned for hours of coldness. She had become a habit with him—a part of him. His physical self cried out for her. It was knit with hers.
A year almost to the day since she had said so lightly, “Come to America”! And now she was so near, and he could not go to her.
Evening. He sat wearily on the Embankment, gazing up at the back of her hotel, trying to guess which window was hers. In the coolness of the golden twilight he had arrived at the first stage in his exact self-knowledge: that waiting for her had become his mission—without her his future would be purposeless. If he made her his wife, he might live to regret it Her faults went too deep for even love to cure. Any emotion of shame which she had owned to was only for the moment. Whether he lost her or won her, he was bound to suffer. Marriage with her might spell intellectual ruin; but to shirk the risk because of that would be to shatter his idealism forever. To save her from herself and to shelter her in so far as she would allow, had become his religion and the inspiration of his work. And wasn’t that the highest sort of love?
He determined to set himself a test He walked to Charing Cross Station, entered a telephone-booth and called up the Savoy.
“Miss Jodrell, please. No, I don’t know the number of the room.”
The trepidation with which he waited brought all his New York memories back.
Her voice. “Hulloa! Yes. This is Miss Jodrell.”
He was at a loss for words. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her across the wire. While he hesitated, he heard her receiver hung up.
He was certain of himself now. He was shaking like a leaf. If her voice could thrill and unnerve him when her body was absent, this must be more than passion.
He sat down till he had grown quiet, then jumping into a taxi he told the man to drive quickly. He could have walked the distance in little over five minutes; but after so much delay, every second saved was an atonement. As he whirled out of the Strand into the courtyard of the Savoy, Big Ben was booming for nine.
For the second time that day he passed his card across the desk. “I want Miss Jodrell.”
The clerk handed him back his card. “She’s left.”
“But she can’t have. I’ve had her on the phone within half an hour.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I wonder she didn’t tell you. You must have spokes with her the last minute before she left. She caught the nine o’clock boat-train from Charing Cross to Dover.”
He went faint and reached out to steady himself. “From Charing Cross! Why, I’ve just come from there. We must have passed. We——”
The man saw that something serious was the matter. He dropped his perfunctory manner. “She’s sure to have left an address for the forwarding of her letters. I’ll look it up if you’ll wait a moment.” He returned. “Her letters were to be addressed Poste Restante to the General Post-office, Paris. I don’t know whether that will help you.”
Before leaving the hotel he sat down and wrote her. Then he went out and sent her a telegram:
“Yours exclusively. Telegraph your address. Will come at once and fetch you.”
He hurried home to Eden Row and packed his bag. He was up early next morning, waiting for her reply. In the evening he sent her a more urgent telegram and another letter. No answer. He thought that she must have received his messages, for he had marked his letters to be returned within a day if not called for. He cursed himself for his ill-timed coldness.
A week of silence, and then—— It was eight in the evening. He was at the top of the house in his bedroom-study—the room in which he had woven so many gold optimisms. Down the blue oblong of sky, framed by his window, the red billiard-ball of the sun rolled smoothly, bound for the pocket of night.
A sharp rat-a-tat. Its meaning was unmistakable. He went leaping down the stairs, three at a time. He reached the hall just as Jane was appearing from the basement Forestalling her at the front-door, he grabbed the pinkish-brown envelope from the telegraph-boy. Ripping it open, he read:
“Sorry delay. Been Lucerne. Just returned Paris. Received all yours. Meet me to-morrow Cherbourg on board ‘Wilhelm der Grosse.’ Please start immediately.”
She had forgotten to put her address. He pulled out his watch. Five minutes past eight! He had no time to consult railway-guides—no time even to pack. All he knew was that the boat-train left Charing-Cross for Dover in less than an hour; he could just catch it Returning to his bedroom, he gathered together what cash he could find In three minutes he was in the hall again.
“Tell mother when she comes back that I’m off to Paris. Tell her I’ll write.”
Jane gaped at him. As he hurried down the steps, she began to ask questions. He shook his head, “No time.”
Throwing dignity to the winds, he set off at a run. As he passed Orchid Lodge, Mr. Sheerug was coming out. He cannoned into him and left him gasping. At the top of Eden Row he saw a taxi and hailed it. He knew now that he was safe to catch his train.
On the drive to the station he unfolded her telegram and re-read it Irresponsible as ever, yet lovable! What risks she took! He might have been out; as it was he could barely make the connections that would get him to Cherbourg in time. No address to which he could reply! He couldn’t let her know that he was coming. Doubtless she took that for granted. No information concerning her plans! She had always told him that wise women kept men guessing. No hint as to why she had sent for him! Twenty-four hours of conjecturing would keep him humble and increase his ardor. Then the motive of all this vagueness dawned on him. She was putting him to the test If he came in spite of the irresponsibility of her message, it would be proof to her that he loved her. If ever a girl needed a man’s love, Desire was that girl.
During the tedious night journey fears began to arise. Why was she going to Cherbourg? He read her words again, “Meet me to-morrow Cherbourg on board Wilhelm der Grosse” What would she be doing on board an Atlantic liner if she wasn’t sailing? She shouldn’t sail if he could prevent her. If she reached New York, she would go on the stage and commit herself irrevocably to Fluffyism.
He steamed into the Gare du Nord at a quarter to seven and learnt, on making inquiries, that the trains for Cherbourg left from the St Lazare. He jumped into an autotaxi—no leisurely fiacre this time—and raced through the gleaming early morning. He found at the St Lazare that the first express that he could catch, departed in three-quarters of an hour. There was another which left later, but it ran to meet the steamer and was reserved exclusively for transatlantic voyagers. The second train would be the one by which she would travel. He debated whether he should try to intercept her on the platform. Too risky.
He might miss her. He preferred to take the chance which she herself had chosen. There would be less than an hour between his arrival in Cherbourg and the time when the steamship sailed.
Having snatched some breakfast, he found a florist’s and purchased an extravagant sheaf of roses.
As soon as Paris was left behind, he was consumed with impotent impatience. It seemed to him that the engine pulled up at every poky little town in Normandy. He got it on his mind that every railroad official was conspiring to make him late. He had one moment of exquisite torture. They had been at a standstill in a station for an interminable time. He got out and, in his scarcely intelligible French, asked the meaning of the delay. The man whom he had questioned pointed; at that moment the non-stop boat-express from Paris overtook them and thundered by. At it passed, he glanced anxiously at the carriage-windows, hoping against hope that he might catch sight of her.
The last exasperation came when they broke down at Rayeux and wasted nearly an hour. He arrived at his destination at the exact moment at which the Wilhelm der Grosse was scheduled to sail.
Picking up the flowers he had purchased for her, he dashed out of the station and shouldered his way to where some fiacres were standing. Thrusting a twenty-franc note into the nearest cocker’s hand, he startled the man into energy.
What a drive! Of the streets through which they galloped he saw nothing. He was only conscious of people escaping to the pavement and of threats shouted through the sunshine.
When they arrived at the quay, the horse was in a lather. Far off, at the mouth of the harbor in a blue-gold haze, the liner lay black, her smoke-stacks smudging the sky. Snuggled against her were the two tugs which had taken out the passengers. An official-looking person in a peaked cap was standing near to where they had halted.
Did he understand English? Certainly. To the question that followed he answered imperturbably: “Too late, monsieur. It is impossible.”
He gazed round wildly. He must get to her. He must at least let Desire know that he had made the journey.
Above the wall of the quay a head in a yachting-cap appeared. He ran towards it. Stone steps led down to the water’s edge. Against the lowest step a power-boat lay rocking gently with the engine still running. No time to ask permission or to make explanations! He sprang down the steps, flung his roses into the boat, turned on the power and was away.
Shouting behind him grew fainter. Now he heard only the panting of the engine and the swirl of waves. The liner stood up taller. He steered for it straight as an arrow. If he could only get there! The tugs were casting loose. Now they were returning. He wasn’t a quarter of a mile away. He cleared the harbor. The steamer was swinging her nose round. He could see her screws churning. His only chance of stopping her was to cut across her bows.
From crowded decks faces were staring down. Some were laughing; some were pale at his foolhardiness. An officer with a thick German accent was cursing him. He could only hear the accent; he couldn’t make out what the man was saying. What did he care? He had forced them to wait for him. From all that blur of faces he was trying to pick out one face.
Making a megaphone of his hands, he shouted. His words were lost in the pounding of the engines and the lapping of the waves. Then he saw a face which he recognized—Fluffy’s. She was saying something to the officer; she was explaining the situation. Leaning across the rail, laughing, she shook her head. The news of the reason for his extraordinary behavior was passing from mouth to mouth along the decks. The laugh was taken up. The whole ship seemed to hold its sides and jeer at him.
The liner gathered way. The last thing he saw distinctly was Fluffy, still laughing and shaking her golden head. She was keeping Desire from him; he knew that she had lied.
The boat rose and fell in the churned-up wake. Like a man whose soul has suddenly died, he sat very silent.
Slowly he came to himself. Evening was falling. He felt old. It was all true, then—the lesson that her mother had taught him in his childhood! There were women in the world whom love could not conquer.
He flung the roses he had bought for her into the sea. Turning the head of the boat, he reentered the harbor.
The End