Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise by David Graham Phillips (page 18)

harmony, a decrease of discord, between the internal man and his environment–truth is a product, usually a byproduct, of a ferment of action.

Gourdain–chiefly, no doubt, because Susan’s beauty of face and figure and dress fascinated him–was more eager to bring out her individuality than to show off his own talents. He took endless pains with her, taught her the technical knowledge and vocabulary that would enable her to express herself, then carried out her ideas religiously. “You are right, _mon ami_,” said he to Brent. “She is an orchid, and of a rare species. She has a glorious imagination, like a bird of paradise balancing itself into an azure sky, with every plume raining color and brilliancy.”

“Somewhat exaggerated,” was Susan’s pleased, laughing comment when Brent told her.

“Somewhat,” said Brent. “But my friend Gourdain is stark mad about women’s dressing well. That lilac dress you had on yesterday did for him. He _was_ your servant; he _is_ your slave.”

Abruptly–for no apparent cause, as was often the case–Susan had that sickening sense of the unreality of her luxurious present, of being about to awaken in Vine Street with Etta–or in the filthy bed with old Mrs. Tucker. Absently she glanced down at her foot, holding it out as if for inspection. She saw Brent’s look of amusement at her seeming vanity.

“I was looking to see if my shoes were leaky,” she explained.

A subtle change came over his face. He understood instantly.

“Have you ever been–cold?” she asked, looking at him strangely.

“One cold February–cold and damp–I had no underclothes–and no overcoat.”

“And dirty beds–filthy rooms–filthy people?”

“A ten-cent lodging house with a tramp for bedfellow.”

They were looking at each other, with the perfect understanding and sympathy that can come only to two people of the same fiber who have braved the same storms. Each glanced hastily away.

Her enthusiasm for doing the apartment was due full as much to the fact that it gave her definitely directed occupation as to its congeniality. That early training of hers from Aunt Fanny Warham had made it forever impossible for her in any circumstances to become the typical luxuriously sheltered woman, whether legally or illegally kept–the lie-abed woman, the woman who dresses only to go out and show off, the woman who wastes her life in petty, piffling trifles–without purpose, without order or system, without morals or personal self-respect. She had never lost the systematic instinct–the instinct to use time instead of wasting it–that Fanny Warham had implanted in her during the years that determine character. Not for a moment, even without distinctly definite aim, was she in danger of the creeping paralysis that is epidemic among the rich, enfeebling and slowing down mental and physical activity. She had a regular life; she read, she walked in the Bois; she made the best of each day. And when this definite thing to accomplish offered, she did not have to learn how to work before she could begin the work itself.

All this was nothing new to Gourdain. He was born and bred in a country where intelligent discipline is the rule and the lack of it the rare exception–among all classes–even among the women of the well-to-do classes.

The finished apartment was a disappointment to Palmer. Its effects were too quiet, too restrained. Within certain small limits, those of the man of unusual intelligence but no marked originality, he had excellent taste–or, perhaps, excellent ability to recognize good taste. But in the large he yearned for the grandiose. He loved the gaudy with which the rich surround themselves because good taste forbids them to talk of their wealth and such surroundings do the talking for them and do it more effectively. He would have preferred even a vulgar glitter to the unobtrusiveness of those rooms. But he knew that Susan was right, and he was a very human arrant coward about admitting that he had bad taste.

“This is beautiful–exquisite,” said he, with feigned enthusiasm. “I’m afraid, though, it’ll be above their heads.”

“What do you mean?” inquired Susan.

Palmer felt her restrained irritation, hastened to explain. “I mean the people who’ll come here. They can’t appreciate it. You have to look twice to appreciate this–and people, the best of ’em, look only once and a mighty blind look it is.”

But Susan was not deceived. “You must tell me what changes you want,” said she. Her momentary irritation had vanished. Since Freddie was paying, Freddie must have what suited him.

“Oh, I’ve got nothing to suggest. Now that I’ve been studying it out, I couldn’t allow you to make any changes. It does grow on one, doesn’t it, Brent?”

“It will be the talk of Paris,” replied Brent.

The playwright’s tone settled the matter for Palmer. He was content. Said he:

“Thank God she hasn’t put in any of those dirty old tapestry rags–and the banged up, broken furniture and the patched crockery.”

At the same time she had produced an effect of long tenancy. There was nothing that glittered, nothing with the offensive sheen of the brand new. There was in that delicately toned atmosphere one suggestion which gave the same impression as the artificial crimson of her lips in contrast with the pallor of her skin and the sweet thoughtful melancholy of her eyes. This suggestion came from an all-pervading odor of a heavy, languorously sweet, sensuous perfume–the same that Susan herself used. She had it made at a perfumer’s in the faubourg St. Honore by mixing in a certain proportion several of the heaviest and most clinging of the familiar perfumes. “You don’t like my perfume?” she said to Brent one day.

He was in the library, was inspecting her _selections_ of books. Instead of answering her question, he said:

“How did you find out so much about books? How did you find time to read so many?”

“One always finds time for what one likes.”

“Not always,” said he. “I had a hard stretch once–just after I struck New York. I was a waiter for two months. Working people don’t find time for reading–and such things.”

“That was one reason why I gave up work,” said she.

“That–and the dirt–and the poor wages–and the hopelessness–and a few other reasons,” said he.

“Why don’t you like the perfume I use?”

“Why do you say that?”

“You made a queer face as you came into the drawing-room.”

“Do _you_ like it?”

“What a queer question!” she said. “No other man would have asked it.”

“The obvious,” said he, shrugging his shoulders.

“I couldn’t help knowing you didn’t like it.”

“Then why should I use it?”

His glance drifted slowly away from hers. He lit a cigarette with much attention to detail.

“Why should I use perfume I don’t like?” persisted she.

“What’s the use of going into that?” said he.

“But I do like it–in a way,” she went on after a pause. “It is–it seems to me the odor of myself.”

“Yes–it is,” he admitted.

She laughed. “Yet you made a wry face.”

“I did.”

“At the odor?”

“At the odor.”

“Do you think I ought to change to another perfume?”

“You know I do not. It’s the odor of your soul. It is different at different times–sometimes inspiringly sweet as the incense of heaven, as my metaphoric friend Gourdain would say–sometimes as deadly sweet as the odors of the drugs men take to drag them to hell–sometimes repulsively sweet, making one heart sick for pure, clean smell-less air yet without the courage to seek it. Your perfume is many things, but always–always strong and tenacious and individual.”

A flush had overspread the pallor of her skin; her long dark lashes hid her eyes.

“You have never been in love,” he went on.

“So you told me once before.” It was the first time either had referred to their New York acquaintance.

“You did not believe me then. But you do now?”

“For me there is no such thing as love,” replied she. “I understand affection–I have felt it. I understand passion. It is a strong force in my life–perhaps the strongest.”

“No,” said he, quiet but positive.

“Perhaps not,” replied she carelessly, and went on, with her more than manlike candor, and in her manner of saying the most startling things in the calmest way:

“I understand what is called love–feebleness looking up to strength or strength pitying feebleness. I understand because I’ve felt both those things. But love–two equal people united perfectly, merged into a third person who is neither yet is both–that I have not felt. I’ve dreamed it. I’ve imagined it–in some moments of passion. But”–she laughed and shrugged her shoulders and waved the hand with the cigarette between its fingers–“I have not felt it and I shall not feel it. I remain I.” She paused, considered, added, “And I prefer that.”

“You are strong,” said he, absent and reflective. “Yes, you are strong.”

“I don’t know,” replied she. “Sometimes I think so. Again—-” She shook her head doubtfully.

“You would be dead if you were not. As strong in soul as in body.”

“Probably,” admitted she. “Anyhow, I am sure I shall always be–alone. I shall visit–I shall linger on my threshold and talk. Perhaps I shall wander in perfumed gardens and dream of comradeship. But I shall return _chez moi_.”

He rose–sighed–laughed–at her and at himself. “Don’t delay too long,” said he.

“Delay?”

“Your career.”

“My career? Why, I am in the full swing of it. I’m at work in the only profession I’m fit for.”

“The profession of woman?”

“Yes–the profession of female.”

He winced–and at this sign, if she did not ask herself what pleased her, she did not ask herself why. He said sharply, “I don’t like that.”

“But _you_ have only to _hear_ it. Think of poor me who have to _live_ it.”

“Have to? No,” said he.

“Surely you’re not suggesting that I drop back into the laboring classes! No, thank you. If you knew, you’d not say anything so stupid.”

“I do know, and I was not suggesting that. Under this capitalistic system the whole working class is degraded. They call what they do `work,’ but that word ought to be reserved for what a man does when he exercises mind and body usefully. What the working class is condemned to by capitalism is not work but toil.”

“The toil of a slave,” said Susan.

“It’s shallow twaddle or sheer want to talk about the dignity and beauty of labor under this system,” he went on. “It is ugly and degrading. The fools or hypocrites who talk that way ought to be forced to join the gangs of slaves at their tasks in factory and mine and shop, in the fields and the streets. And even the easier and better paid tasks, even what the capitalists themselves do–those things aren’t dignified and beautiful. Capitalism divides all men except those of one class–the class to which I luckily belong–divides all other men into three unlovely classes–slave owners, slave drivers and slaves. But you’re not interested in those questions.”

“In wage slavery? No. I wish to forget about it. Any alternative to being a wage slave or a slave driver–or a slave owner. Any alternative.”

“You don’t appreciate your own good fortune,” said he. “Most human beings–all but a very few–have to be in the slave classes, in one way or another. They have to submit to the repulsive drudgery, with no advancement except to slave driver. As for women–if they have to work, what can they do but sell themselves into slavery to the machines, to the capitalists? But you–you needn’t do that. Nature endowed you with talent–unusual talent, I believe. How lucky you are! How superior to the great mass of your fellow beings who must slave or starve, because they have no talent!”

“Talent?–I?” said Susan. “For what, pray?”

“For the stage.”

She looked amused. “You evidently don’t think me vain–or you’d not venture that jest.”

“For the stage,” he repeated.

“Thanks,” said she drily, “but I’ll not appeal from your verdict.”

“My verdict? What do you mean?”

“I prefer to talk of something else,” said she coldly, offended by his unaccountable disregard of her feelings.

“This is bewildering,” said he. And his manner certainly fitted the words.

“That I should have understood? Perhaps I shouldn’t–at least, not so quickly–if I hadn’t heard how often you have been disappointed, and how hard it has been for you to get rid of some of those you tried and found wanting.”

“Believe me–I was not disappointed in you.” He spoke earnestly, apparently with sincerity. “The contrary. Your throwing it all up was one of the shocks of my life.”

She laughed mockingly–to hide her sensitiveness.

“One of the shocks of my life,” he repeated.

She was looking at him curiously–wondering why he was thus uncandid.

“It puzzled me,” he went on. “I’ve been lingering on here, trying to solve the puzzle. And the more I’ve seen of you the less I understand. Why did you do it? How could _you_ do it?”

He was walking up and down the room in a characteristic pose– hands clasped behind his back as if to keep them quiet, body erect, head powerfully thrust forward. He halted abruptly and wheeled to face her. “Do you mean to tell me you didn’t get tired of work and drop it for–” he waved his arm to indicate her luxurious surroundings–“for this?”

No sign of her agitation showed at the surface. But she felt she was not concealing herself from him.

He resumed his march, presently to halt and wheel again upon her. But before he could speak, she stopped him.

“I don’t wish to hear any more,” said she, the strange look in her eyes. It was all she could do to hide the wild burst of emotion that had followed her discovery. Then she had not been without a chance for a real career! She might have been free, might have belonged to herself—-

“It is not too late,” cried he. “That’s why I’m here.”

“It is too late,” she said.

“It is not too late,” repeated he, harshly, in his way that swept aside opposition. “I shall get you back.” Triumphantly, “The puzzle is solved!”

She faced him with a look of defiant negation. “That ocean I crossed–it’s as narrow as the East River into which I thought of throwing myself many a time–it’s as narrow as the East River beside the ocean between what I am and what I was. And I’ll never go back. Never!”

She repeated the “never” quietly, under her breath. His eyes looked as if they, without missing an essential detail, had swept the whole of that to which she would never go back. He said:

“Go back? No, indeed. Who’s asking you to go back? Not I. I’m not _asking_ you to go anywhere. I’m simply saying that you will–_must_–go forward. If you were in love, perhaps not. But you aren’t in love. I know from experience how men and women care for each other–how they form these relationships. They find each other convenient and comfortable. But they care only for themselves. Especially young people. One must live quite a while to discover that thinking about oneself is living in a stuffy little cage with only a little light, through slats in the top that give no view. . . . It’s an unnatural life for you. It can’t last. You–centering upon yourself–upon comfort and convenience. Absurd!”

“I have chosen,” said she.

“No–you can’t do it,” he went on, as if she had not spoken. “_You_ can’t spend your life at dresses and millinery, at chattering about art, at thinking about eating and drinking–at being passively amused–at attending to your hair and skin and figure. You may think so, but in reality you are getting ready for _me_ . . . for your career. You are simply educating yourself. I shall have you back.”

She held the cigarette to her lips, inhaled the smoke deeply, exhaled it slowly.

“I will tell you why,” he went on, as if he were answering a protest. “Every one of us has an individuality of some sort. And in spite of everything and anything, except death or hopeless disease, that individuality will insist upon expressing itself.”

“Mine is expressing itself,” said she with a light smile–the smile of a light woman.

“You can’t rest in this present life of yours. Your individuality is too strong. It will have its way–and for all your mocking smiling, you know I am right. I understand how you were tempted into it—-”

She opened her lips–changed her mind and stopped her lips with her cigarette.

“I don’t blame you–and it was just as well. This life has taught you–will teach you–will advance you in your career. . . . Tell me, what gave you the idea that I was disappointed?”

She tossed her cigarette into the big ash tray. “As I told you, it is too late.” She rose and looked at him with a strange, sweet smile. “I’ve got any quantity of faults,” said she. “But there’s one I haven’t got. I don’t whine.”

“You don’t whine,” assented he, “and you don’t lie–and you don’t shirk. Men and women have been canonized for less. I understand that for some reason you can’t talk about—-”

“Then why do you continue to press me?” said she, a little coldly.

He accepted the rebuke with a bow. “Nevertheless,” said he, with raillery to carry off his persistence, “I shall get you. If not sooner, then when the specter of an obscure–perhaps poor–old age begins to agitate the rich hangings of youth’s banquet hall.”

“That’ll be a good many years yet,” mocked she. And from her lovely young face flashed the radiant defiance of her perfect youth and health.

“Years that pass quickly,” retorted he, unmoved.

She was still radiant, still smiling, but once more she was seeing the hideous old women of the tenements. Into her nostrils stole the stench of the foul den in which she had slept with Mrs. Tucker and Mrs. Reardon–and she was hearing the hunchback of the dive playing for the drunken dancing old cronies, with their tin cups of whiskey.

No danger of that now? How little she was saving of her salary from Palmer! She could not “work” men–she simply could not. She would never put by enough to be independent and every day her tastes for luxury had firmer hold upon her. No danger? As much danger as ever–a danger postponed but certain to threaten some day–and then, a fall from a greater height–a certain fall. She was hearing the battered, shattered piano of the dive.

“For pity’s sake Mrs. Palmer!” cried Brent, in a low voice.

She started. The beautiful room, the environment of luxury and taste and comfort came back.

Gourdain interrupted and then Palmer.

The four went to the Cafe Anglais for dinner. Brent announced that he was going to the Riviera soon to join a party of friends. “I wish you would visit me later,” said he, with a glance that included them all and rested, as courtesy required, upon Susan. “There’s room in my villa–barely room.”

“We’ve not really settled here,” said Susan. “And we’ve taken up French seriously.”

“The weather’s frightful,” said Palmer, with a meaning glance at her. “I think we ought to go.”

But her expression showed that she had no intention of going, no sympathy with Palmer’s desire to use this excellent, easy ladder of Brent’s offering to make the ascent into secure respectability.

“Next winter, then,” said Brent, who was observing her. “Or–in the early spring, perhaps.”

“Oh, we may change our minds and come,” Palmer suggested eagerly. “I’m going to try to persuade my wife.”

“Come if you can,” said Brent cordially. “I’ll have no one stopping with me.”

When they were alone, Palmer sent his valet away and fussed about impatiently until Susan’s maid had unhooked her dress and had got her ready for bed. As the maid began the long process of giving her hair a thorough brushing, he said, “Please let her go, Susan. I want to tell you something.”

“She does not know a word of English.”

“But these French are so clever that they understand perfectly with their eyes.”

Susan sent the maid to bed and sat in a dressing gown brushing her hair. It was long enough to reach to the middle of her back and to cover her bosom. It was very thick and wavy. Now that the scarlet was washed from her lips for the night, her eyes shone soft and clear with no relief for their almost tragic melancholy. He was looking at her in profile. Her expression was stern as well as sad–the soul of a woman who has suffered and has been made strong, if not hard.

“I got a letter from my lawyers today,” he began. “It was about that marriage. I’ll read.”

At the word “marriage,” she halted the regular stroke of the brush. Her eyes gazed into the mirror of the dressing table through her reflection deep into her life, deep into the vistas of memory. As he unfolded the letter, she leaned back in the low chair, let her hands drop to her lap.

“`As the inclosed documents show,'” he read, “`we have learned and have legally verified that Jeb–not James–Ferguson divorced his wife Susan Lenox about a year after their marriage, on the ground of desertion; and two years later he fell through the floor of an old bridge near Brooksburg and was killed.'”

The old bridge–she was feeling its loose flooring sag and shift under the cautious hoofs of the horse. She was seeing Rod Spenser on the horse, behind him a girl, hardly more than a child–under the starry sky exchanging confidences–talking of their futures.

“So, you see, you are free,” said Palmer. “I went round to an American lawyer’s office this afternoon, and borrowed an old legal form book. And I’ve copied out this form—-”

She was hardly conscious of his laying papers on the table before her.

“It’s valid, as I’ve fixed things. The lawyer gave me some paper. It has a watermark five years old. I’ve dated back two years–quite enough. So when we’ve signed, the marriage never could be contested–not even by ourselves.”

He took the papers from the table, laid them in her lap. She started. “What were you saying?” she asked. “What’s this?”

“What were you thinking about?” said he.

“I wasn’t thinking,” she answered, with her slow sweet smile of self-concealment. “I was feeling–living–the past. I was watching the procession.”

He nodded understandingly. “That’s a kind of time-wasting that can easily be overdone.”

“Easily,” she agreed. “Still, there’s the lesson. I have to remind myself of it often–always, when there’s anything that has to be decided.”

“I’ve written out two of the forms,” said he. “We sign both. You keep one, I the other. Why not sign now?”

She read the form–the agreement to take each other as lawful husband and wife and to regard the contract as in all respects binding and legal.

“Do you understand it?” laughed he nervously, for her manner was disquieting.

“Perfectly.”

“You stared at the paper as if it were a puzzle.”

“It is,” said she.

“Come into the library and we’ll sign and have it over with.”

She laid the papers on the dressing table, took up her brush, drew it slowly over her hair several times.

“Wake up,” cried he, good humoredly. “Come on into the library.” And he went to the threshold.

She continued brushing her hair. “I can’t sign,” said she. There was the complete absence of emotion that caused her to be misunderstood always by those who did not know her peculiarities. No one could have suspected the vision of the old women of the dive before her eyes, the sound of the hunchback’s piano in her ears, the smell of foul liquors and foul bodies and foul breaths in her nostrils. Yet she repeated:

“No–I can’t sign.”

He returned to his chair, seated himself, a slight cloud on his brow, a wicked smile on his lips. “Now what the devil!” said he gently, a jeer in his quiet voice. “What’s all this about?”

“I can’t marry you,” said she. “I wish to live on as we are.”

“But if we do that we can’t get up where we want to go.”

“I don’t wish to know anyone but interesting men of the sort that does things–and women of my own sort. Those people have no interest in conventionalities.”

“That’s not the crowd we set out to conquer,” said he. “You seem to have forgotten.”

“It’s you who have forgotten,” replied she.

“Yes–yes–I know,” he hastened to say. “I wasn’t accusing you of breaking your agreement. You’ve lived up to it–and more. But, Susan, the people you care about don’t especially interest me. Brent–yes. He’s a man of the world as well as one of the artistic chaps. But the others–they’re beyond me. I admit it’s all fine, and I’m glad you go in for it. But the only crowd that’s congenial to me is the crowd that we’ve got to be married to get in with.”

She saw his point–saw it more clearly than did he. To him the world of fashion and luxurious amusement seemed the only world worth while. He accepted the scheme of things as he found it, had the conventional ambitions–to make in succession the familiar goals of the conventional human success–power, wealth, social position. It was impossible for him to get any other idea of a successful life, of ambitions worthy a man’s labor. It was evidence of the excellence of his mind that he was able to tolerate the idea of the possibility of there being another mode of success worth while.

“I’m helping you in your ambitions–in doing what you think is worth while,” said he. “Don’t you think you owe it to me to help me in mine?”

He saw the slight change of expression that told him how deeply he had touched her.

“If I don’t go in for the high society game,” he went on, “I’ll have nothing to do. I’ll be adrift–gambling, drinking, yawning about and going to pieces. A man’s got to have something to work for–and he can’t work unless it seems to him worth doing.”

She was staring into the mirror, her elbows on the table, her chin upon her interlaced fingers. It would be difficult to say how much of his gentleness to her was due to her physical charm for him, and how much to his respect for her mind and her character. He himself would have said that his weakness was altogether the result of the spell her physical charm cast over him. But it is probable that the other element was the stronger.

“You’ll not be selfish, Susan?” urged he. “You’ll give me a square deal.”

“Yes–I see that it does look selfish,” said she. “A little while ago I’d not have been able to see any deeper than the looks of it. Freddie, there are some things no one has a right to ask of another, and no one has a right to grant.”

The ugliness of his character was becoming less easy to control. This girl whom he had picked up, practically out of the gutter, and had heaped generosities upon, was trying his patience too far. But he said, rather amiably:

“Certainly I’m not asking any such thing of you in asking you to become a respectable married woman, the wife of a rich man.”

“Yes–you are, Freddie,” replied she gently. “If I married you, I’d be signing an agreement to lead your life, to give up my own–an agreement to become a sort of woman I’ve no desire to be and no interest in being; to give up trying to become the only sort of woman I think is worth while. When we were discussing my coming with you, you made this same proposal in another form. I refused it then. And I refuse it now. It’s harder to refuse now, but I’m stronger.”

“Stronger, thanks to the money you’ve got from me–the money and the rest of it,” sneered he.

“Haven’t I earned all I’ve got?” said she, so calmly that he did not realize how the charge of ingratitude, unjust though it was, had struck into her.

“You have changed!” said he. “You’re getting as hard as the rest of us. So it’s all a matter of money, of give and take–is it? None of the generosity and sentiment you used to be full of? You’ve simply been using me.”

“It can be put that way,” replied she. “And no doubt you honestly see it that way. But I’ve got to see my own interest and my own right, Freddie. I’ve learned at last that I mustn’t trust to anyone else to look after them for me.”

“Are you riding for a fall–Queenie?”

At “Queenie” she smiled faintly. “I’m riding the way I always have,” answered she. “It has carried me down. But–it has brought me up again.” She looked at him with eyes that appealed, without yielding. “And I’ll ride that way to the end–up or down,” said she. “I can’t help it.”

“Then you want to break with me?” he asked–and he began to look dangerous.

“No,” replied she. “I want to go on as we are. . . . I’ll not be interfering in your social ambitions, in any way. Over here it’ll help you to have a mistress who–” she saw her image in the glass, threw him an arch glance–“who isn’t altogether unattractive won’t it? And if you found you could go higher by marrying some woman of the grand world–why, you’d be free to do it.”

He had a way of looking at her that gave her–and himself–the sense of a delirious embrace. He looked at her so, now. He said:

“You take advantage of my being crazy about you–_damn_ you!”

“Heaven knows,” laughed she, “I need every advantage I can find.”

He touched her–the lightest kind of touch. It carried the sense of embrace in his look still more giddily upward. “Queenie!” he said softly.

She smiled at him through half closed eyes that with a gentle and shy frankness confessed the secret of his attraction for her. There was, however, more of strength than of passion in her face as a whole. Said she:

“We’re getting on well–as we are aren’t we? I can meet the most amusing and interesting people–my sort of people. You can go with the people and to the places you like and you’ll not be bound. If you should take a notion to marry some woman with a big position–you’d not have to regret being tied to–Queenie.”

“But–I want you–I want you,” said he. “I’ve got to have you.”

“As long as you like,” said she. “But on terms I can accept–always on terms I can accept. Never on any others–never! I can’t help it. I can yield everything but that.”

Where she was concerned he was the primitive man only. The higher his passion rose, the stronger became his desire for absolute possession. When she spoke of terms–of the limitations upon his possession of her–she transformed his passion into fury. He eyed her wickedly, abruptly demanded:

“When did you decide to make this kick-up?”

“I don’t know. Simply–when you asked me to sign, I found I couldn’t.”

“You don’t expect _me_ to believe that.”

“It’s the truth.” She resumed brushing her hair.

“Look at me!”

She turned her face toward him, met his gaze.

“Have you fallen in love with that young Jew?”

“Gourdain? No.”

“Have you a crazy notion that your looks’ll get you a better husband? A big fortune or a title?”

“I haven’t thought about a husband. Haven’t I told you I wish to be free?”

“But that doesn’t mean anything.”

“It might,” said she absently.

“How?”

“I don’t know. If one is always free–one is ready for–whatever comes. Anyhow, I must be free–no matter what it costs.”

“I see you’re bent on dropping back into the dirt I picked you out of.”

“Even that,” she said. “I must be free.”

“Haven’t you any desire to be respectable–decent?”

“I guess not,” confessed she. “What is there in that direction for me?”

“A woman doesn’t stay young and good-looking long.”

“No.” She smiled faintly. “But does she get old and ugly any slower for being married?”

He rose and stood over her, looked smiling danger down at her. She leaned back in her chair to meet his eyes without constraint. “You’re trying to play me a trick,” said he. “But you’re not going to get away with the goods. I’m astonished that you are so rotten ungrateful.”

“Because I’m not for sale?”

“Queenie balking at selling herself,” he jeered. “And what’s the least you ever did sell for?”

“A half-dollar, I think. No–two drinks of whiskey one cold night. But what I sold was no more myself than–than the coat I’d pawned and drunk up before I did it.”

The plain calm way in which she said this made it so terrible that he winced and turned away. “We have seen hell–haven’t we?” he muttered. He turned toward her with genuine passion of feeling. “Susan,” he cried, “don’t be a fool. Let’s push our luck, now that things are coming our way. We need each other–we want to stay together–don’t we?”

“__I__ want to stay. I’m happy.”

“Then–let’s put the record straight.”

“Let’s keep it straight,” replied she earnestly. “Don’t ask me to go where I don’t belong. For I can’t, Freddie–honestly, I can’t.”

A pause. Then, “You will!” said he, not in blustering fury, but in that cool and smiling malevolence which had made him the terror of his associates from his boyhood days among the petty thieves and pickpockets of Grand Street. He laid his hand gently on her shoulder. “You hear me. I say you will.”

She looked straight at him. “Not if you kill me,” she said. She rose to face him at his own height. “I’ve bought my freedom with my body and with my heart and with my soul. It’s all I’ve got. I shall keep it.”

He measured her strength with an expert eye. He knew that he was beaten. He laughed lightly and went into his dressing-room. XXII

THEY met the next morning with no sign in the manner of either that there had been a drawn battle, that there was an armed truce. She knew that he, like herself, was thinking of nothing else. But until he had devised some way of certainly conquering her he would wait, and watch, and pretend that he was satisfied with matters as they were. The longer she reflected the less uneasy she became–as to immediate danger. In Paris the methods of violence he might have been tempted to try in New York were out of the question. What remained? He must realize that threats to expose her would be futile; also, he must feel vulnerable, himself, to that kind of attack–a feeling that would act as a restraint, even though he might appreciate that she was the sort of person who could not in any circumstances resort to it. He had not upon her a single one of the holds a husband has upon a wife. True, he could break with her. But she must appreciate how easy it would now be for her in this capital of the idle rich to find some other man glad to “protect” a woman so expert at gratifying man’s vanity of being known as the proprietor of a beautiful and fashionable woman. She had discovered how, in the aristocracy of European wealth, an admired mistress was as much a necessary part of the grandeur of great nobles, great financiers, great manufacturers, or merchants, as wife, as heir, as palace, as equipage, as chef, as train of secretaries and courtiers. She knew how deeply it would cut, to find himself without his show piece that made him the envied of men and the desired of women. Also, she knew that she had an even stronger hold upon him–that she appealed to him as no other woman ever had, that she had become for him a tenacious habit. She was not afraid that he would break with her. But she could not feel secure; in former days she had seen too far into the mazes of that Italian mind of his, she knew too well how patient, how relentless, how unforgetting he was. She would have taken murder into account as more than a possibility but for his intense and intelligent selfishness; he would not risk his life or his liberty; he would not deprive himself of his keenest pleasure. He was resourceful; but in the circumstances what resources were there for him to draw upon?

When he began to press upon her more money than ever, and to buy her costly jewelry, she felt still further reassured. Evidently he had been unable to think out any practicable scheme; evidently he was, for the time, taking the course of appeal to her generous instincts, of making her more and more dependent upon his liberality.

Well–was he not right? Love might fail; passion might wane; conscience, aiding self-interest with its usual servility, might overcome the instincts of gratitude. But what power could overcome the loyalty resting upon money interest? No power but that of a longer purse than his. As she was not in the mood to make pretenses about herself to herself, she smiled at this cynical self-measuring. “But I shan’t despise myself for being so material,” said she to herself, “until I find a _genuine_ case of a woman, respectable or otherwise, who has known poverty and escaped from it, and has then voluntarily given up wealth to go back to it. I should not stay on with him if he were distasteful to me. And that’s more than most women can honestly say. Perhaps even I should not stay on if it were not for a silly, weak feeling of obligation–but I can’t be sure of that.” She had seen too much of men and women preening upon noble disinterested motives when in fact their real motives were the most calculatingly selfish; she preferred doing herself less than justice rather than more.

She had fifty-five thousand francs on deposit at Munroe’s–all her very own. She had almost two hundred thousand francs’ worth of jewels, which she would be justified in keeping–at least, she hoped she would think so–should there come a break with Freddie. Yet in spite of this substantial prosperity–or was it because of this prosperity?–she abruptly began again to be haunted by the old visions, by warnings of the dangers that beset any human being who has not that paying trade or profession which makes him or her independent–gives him or her the only unassailable independence.

The end with Freddie might be far away. But end, she saw, there would be the day when he would somehow get her in his power and so would drive her to leave him. For she could not again become a slave. Extreme youth, utter inexperience, no knowledge of real freedom–these had enabled her to endure in former days. But she was wholly different now. She could not sink back. Steadily she was growing less and less able to take orders from anyone. This full-grown passion for freedom, this intolerance of the least restraint–how dangerous, if she should find herself in a position where she would have to put up with the caprices of some man or drop down and down!

What real, secure support had she? None. Her building was without solid foundations. Her struggle with Freddie was a revelation and a warning. There were days when, driving about in her luxurious car, she could do nothing but search among the crowds in the streets for the lonely old women in rags, picking and peering along the refuse of the cafes–weazened, warped figures swathed in rags, creeping along, mumbling to themselves, lips folded in and in over toothless gums.

One day Brent saw again the look she often could not keep from her face when that vision of the dance hall in the slums was horrifying her. He said impulsively:

“What is it? Tell me–what is it, Susan?”

It was the first and the last time he ever called her by her only personal name. He flushed deeply. To cover his confusion–and her own–she said in her most frivolous way:

“I was thinking that if I am ever rich I shall have more pairs of shoes and stockings and take care of more orphans than anyone else in the world.”

“A purpose! At last a purpose!” laughed he. “Now you will go to work.”

Through Gourdain she got a French teacher–and her first woman friend.

The young widow he recommended, a Madame Clelie Deliere, was the most attractive woman she had ever known. She had all the best French characteristics–a good heart, a lively mind, was imaginative yet sensible, had good taste in all things. Like most of the attractive French women, she was not beautiful, but had that which is of far greater importance–charm. She knew not a word of English, and it was perhaps Susan’s chief incentive toward working hard at French that she could not really be friends with this fascinating person until she learned to speak her language. Palmer–partly by nature, partly through early experience in the polyglot tenement district of New York–had more aptitude for language than had Susan. But he had been lazy about acquiring French in a city where English is spoken almost universally. With the coming of young Madame Deliere to live in the apartment, he became interested.

It was not a month after her coming when you might have seen at one of the fashionable gay restaurants any evening a party of four–Gourdain was the fourth–talking French almost volubly. Palmer’s accent was better than Susan’s. She could not–and felt she never could–get the accent of the trans-Alleghany region out of her voice–and so long as that remained she would not speak good French. “But don’t let that trouble you,” said Clelie. “Your voice is your greatest charm. It is so honest and so human. Of the Americans I have met, I have liked only those with that same tone in their voices.”

“But __I__ haven’t that accent,” said Freddie with raillery.

Madame Clelie laughed. “No–and I do not like you,” retorted she. “No one ever did. You do not wish to be liked. You wish to be feared.” Her lively brown eyes sparkled and the big white teeth in her generous mouth glistened. “You wish to be feared–and you _are_ feared, Monsieur Freddie.”

“It takes a clever woman to know how to flatter with the truth,” said he. “Everybody always has been afraid of me–and is–except, of course, my wife.”

He was always talking of “my wife” now. The subject so completely possessed his mind that he aired it unconsciously. When she was not around he boasted of “my wife’s” skill in the art of dress, of “my wife’s” taste, of “my wife’s” shrewdness in getting her money’s worth. When she was there, he was using the favorite phrase “my wife” this–“my wife” that–“my wife” the other–until it so got on her nerves that she began to wait for it and to wince whenever it came–never a wait of many minutes. At first she thought he was doing this deliberately either to annoy her or in pursuance of some secret deep design. But she soon saw that he was not aware of his inability to keep off the subject or of his obsession for that phrase representing the thing he was intensely wishing and willing–“chiefly,” she thought, “because it is something he cannot have.” She was amazed at his display of such a weakness. It gave her the chance to learn an important truth about human nature–that self-indulgence soon destroys the strongest nature–and she was witness to how rapidly an inflexible will disintegrates if incessantly applied to an impossibility. When a strong arrogant man, unbalanced by long and successful self-indulgence, hurls himself at an obstruction, either the obstruction yields or the man is destroyed.

One morning early in February, as she was descending from her auto in front of the apartment house, she saw Brent in the doorway. Never had he looked so young or so well. His color was fine, his face had become almost boyish; upon his skin and in his eyes was that gloss of perfect health which until these latter days of scientific hygiene was rarely seen after twenty-five in a woman or after thirty in a man. She gathered in all, to the smallest detail–such as the color of his shirt–with a single quick glance. She knew that he had seen her before she saw him–that he had been observing her. Her happiest friendliest smile made her small face bewitching as she advanced with outstretched hand.

“When did you come?” she asked.

“About an hour ago.”

“From the Riviera?”

“No, indeed. From St. Moritz–and skating and skiing and tobogganing. I rather hoped I looked it. Doing those things in that air–it’s being born again.”

“I felt well till I saw you,” said she. “Now I feel dingy and half sick.”

He laughed, his glance sweeping her from hat to boots. Certainly his eyes could not have found a more entrancing sight. She was wearing a beautiful dress of golden brown cloth, sable hat, short coat and muff, brown suede boots laced high upon her long slender calves. And when she had descended from the perfect little limousine made to order for her, he had seen a ravishing flutter of lingerie of pale violet silk. The sharp air had brought no color to her cheeks to interfere with the abrupt and fascinating contrast of their pallor with the long crimson bow of her mouth. But her skin seemed transparent and had the clearness of health itself. Everything about her, every least detail, was of Parisian perfection.

“Probably there are not in the world,” said he, “so many as a dozen women so well put together as you are. No, not half a dozen. Few women carry the art of dress to the point of genius.”

“I see they had only frumps at St. Moritz this season,” laughed she.

But he would not be turned aside. “Most of the well dressed women stop short with being simply frivolous in spending so much time at less than perfection–like the army of poets who write pretty good verse, or the swarm of singers who sing pretty well. I’ve heard of you many times this winter. You are the talk of Paris.”

She laughed with frank delight. It was indeed a pleasure to discover that her pains had not been in vain.

“It is always the outsider who comes to the great city to show it its own resources,” he went on. “I knew you were going to do this. Still happy?”

“Oh, yes.”

But he had taken her by surprise. A faint shadow flitted across her face. “Not so happy, I see.”

“You see too much. Won’t you lunch with us? We’ll have it in about half an hour.”

He accepted promptly and they went up together. His glance traveled round the drawing-room; and she knew he had noted all the changes she had made on better acquaintance with her surroundings and wider knowledge of interior furnishing. She saw that he approved, and it increased her good humor. “Are you hurrying through Paris on your way to somewhere else?” she asked.

“No, I stop here–I think–until I sail for America.”

“And that will be soon?”

“Perhaps not until July. I have no plans. I’ve finished a play a woman suggested to me some time ago. And I’m waiting.”

A gleam of understanding came into her eyes. There was controlled interest in her voice as she inquired:

“When is it to be produced?”

“When the woman who suggested it is ready to act in it.”

“Do I by any chance know her?”

“You used to know her. You will know her again.”

She shook her head slowly, a pensive smile hovering about her eyes and lips. “No–not again. I have changed.”

“We do not change,” said he. “We move, but we do not change. You are the same character you were when you came into the world. And what you were then, that you will be when the curtain falls on the climax of your last act. Your circumstances will change–and your clothes–and your face, hair, figure–but not _you_.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I _know_ it.”

She nodded slowly, the violet-gray eyes pensive. “Birds in the strong wind–that’s what we are. Driven this way or that–or quite beaten down. But the wind doesn’t change sparrow to eagle–or eagle to gull–does it?”

She had removed her coat and was seated on an oval lounge gazing into the open fire. He was standing before it, looking taller and stronger than ever, in a gray lounging suit. A cigarette depended loosely from the corner of his mouth. He said abruptly:

“How are you getting on with your acting?”

She glanced in surprise.

“Gourdain,” Brent explained. “He had to talk to somebody about how wonderful you are. So he took to writing me–two huge letters a week–all about you.”

“I’m fond of him. And he’s fond of Clelie. She’s my—-”

“I know all,” he interrupted. “The tie between them is their fondness for you. Tell me about the acting.”

“Oh–Clelie and I have been going to the theater every few days–to help me with French. She is mad about acting, and there’s nothing I like better.”

“Also, _you_ simply have to have occupation.”

She nodded. “I wasn’t brought up to fit me for an idler. When I was a child I was taught to keep busy–not at nothing, but at something. Freddie’s a lot better at it than I.”

“Naturally,” said Brent. “You had a home, with order and a system–an old-fashioned American home. He–well, he hadn’t.”

“Clelie and I go at our make-believe acting quite seriously. We have to–if we’re to fool ourselves that it’s an occupation.”

“Why this anxiety to prove to me that you’re not really serious?”

Susan laughed mockingly for answer, and went on:

“You should see us do the two wives in `L’Enigme’–or mother and daughter in that diary scene in `L’Autre Danger’!”

“I must. . . . When are you going to resume your career?”

She rose, strolled toward an open door at one end of the salon, closed it–strolled toward the door into the hall, glanced out, returned without having closed it. She then said:

“Could I study here in Paris?”

Triumph gleamed in his eyes. “Yes. Boudrin–a splendid teacher–speaks English. He–and I–can teach you.”

“Tell me what I’d have to do.”

“We would coach you for a small part in some play that’s to be produced here.”

“In French?”

“I’ll have an American girl written into a farce. Enough to get you used to the stage–to give you practice in what he’ll teach you–the trade side of the art.”

“And then?”

“And then we shall spend the summer learning your part in my play. Two or three weeks of company rehearsals in New York in September. In October–your name out over the Long Acre Theater in letters of fire.”

“Could that be done?”

“Even if you had little talent, less intelligence, and no experience. Properly taught, the trade part of every art is easy. Teachers make it hard partly because they’re dull, chiefly because there’d be small money for them if they taught quickly, and only the essentials. No, journeyman acting’s no harder to learn than bricklaying or carpentering. And in America–everywhere in the world but a few theaters in Paris and Vienna–there is nothing seen but journeyman acting. The art is in its infancy as an art. It even has not yet been emancipated from the swaddling clothes of declamation. Yes, you can do well by the autumn. And if you develop what I think you have in you, you can leap with one bound into fame. In America or England, mind you–because there the acting is all poor to `pretty good’.”

“You are sure it could be done? No–I don’t mean that. I mean, is there really a chance–any chance–for me to make my own living? A real living?”

“I guarantee,” said Brent.

She changed from seriousness to a mocking kind of gayety–that is, to a seriousness so profound that she would not show it. And she said:

“You see I simply must banish my old women–and that hunchback and his piano. They get on my nerves.”

He smiled humorously at her. But behind the smile his gaze–grave, sympathetic–pierced into her soul, seeking the meaning he knew she would never put into words.

At the sound of voices in the hall she said:

“We’ll talk of this again.”

At lunch that day she, for the first time in many a week, listened without irritation while Freddie poured forth his unending praise of “my wife.” As Brent knew them intimately, Freddie felt free to expatiate upon all the details of domestic economy that chanced to be his theme, with the exquisite lunch as a text. He told Brent how Susan had made a study of that branch of the art of living; how she had explored the unrivaled Parisian markets and groceries and shops that dealt in specialties; how she had developed their breakfasts, dinners, and lunches to works of art. It is impossible for anyone, however stupid, to stop long in Paris without beginning to idealize the material side of life–for the French, who build solidly, first idealize food, clothing, and shelter, before going on to take up the higher side of life–as a sane man builds his foundation before his first story, and so on, putting the observation tower on last of all, instead of making an ass of himself trying to hang his tower to the stars. Our idealization goes forward haltingly and hypocritically because we try to build from the stars down, instead of from the ground up. The place to seek the ideal is in the homely, the commonplace, and the necessary. An ideal that does not spring deep-rooted from the soil of practical life may be a topic for a sermon or a novel or for idle conversation among silly and pretentious people. But what use has it in a world that must _live_, and must be taught to live?

Freddie was unaware that he was describing a further development of Susan–a course she was taking in the university of experience–she who had passed through its common school, its high school, its college. To him her clever housekeeping offered simply another instance of her cleverness in general. His discourse was in bad taste. But its bad taste was tolerable because he was interesting–food, like sex, being one of those universal subjects that command and hold the attention of all mankind. He rose to no mean height of eloquence in describing their dinner of the evening before–the game soup that brought to him visions of a hunting excursion he had once made into the wilds of Canada; the way the _barbue_ was cooked and served; the incredible duck–and the salad! Clelie interrupted to describe that salad as like a breath of summer air from fields and limpid brooks. He declared that the cheese–which Susan had found in a shop in the Marche St. Honore–was more wonderful than the most wonderful _petit Suisse_. “And the coffee!” he exclaimed. “But you’ll see in a few minutes. We have _coffee_ here.”

“_Quelle histoire!_” exclaimed Brent, when Freddie had concluded. And he looked at Susan with the ironic, quizzical gleam in his eyes.

She colored. “I am learning to live,” said she. “That’s what we’re on earth for–isn’t it?”

“To learn to live–and then, to live,” replied he.

She laughed. “Ah, that comes a little later.”

“Not much later,” rejoined he, “or there’s no time left for it.”

It was Freddie who, after lunch, urged Susan and Clelie to “show Brent what you can do at acting.”

“Yes–by all means,” said Brent with enthusiasm.

And they gave–in one end of the salon which was well suited for it–the scene between mother and daughter over the stolen diary, in “L’Autre Danger.” Brent said little when they finished, so little that Palmer was visibly annoyed. But Susan, who was acquainted with his modes of expression, felt a deep glow of satisfaction. She had no delusions about her attempts; she understood perfectly that they were simply crude attempts. She knew she had done well–for her–and she knew he appreciated her improvement.

“That would have gone fine–with costumes and scenery–eh?” demanded Freddie of Brent.

“Yes,” said Brent absently. “Yes–that is–Yes.”

Freddie was dissatisfied with this lack of enthusiasm. He went on insistently:

“I think she ought to go on the stage–she and Madame Clelie, too.”

“Yes,” said Brent, between inquiry and reflection.

“What do _you_ think?”

“I don’t think she ought,” replied Brent. “I think she _must_.” He turned to Susan. “Would you like it?”

Susan hesitated. Freddie said–rather lamely, “Of course she would. For my part, I wish she would.”

“Then I will,” said Susan quietly.

Palmer looked astounded. He had not dreamed she would assent. He knew her tones–knew that the particular tone meant finality. “You’re joking,” cried he, with an uneasy laugh. “Why, you wouldn’t stand the work for a week. It’s hard work–isn’t it, Brent?”

“About the hardest,” said Brent. “And she’s got practically everything still to learn.”

“Shall we try, Clelie?” said Susan.

Young Madame Deliere was pale with eagerness. “Ah–but that would be worth while!” cried she.

“Then it’s settled,” said Susan. To Brent: “We’ll make the arrangements at once–today.”

Freddie was looking at her with a dazed expression. His glance presently drifted from her face to the fire, to rest there thoughtfully as he smoked his cigar. He took no part in the conversation that followed. Presently he left the room without excusing himself. When Clelie seated herself at the piano to wander vaguely from one piece of music to another, Brent joined Susan at the fire and said in English:

“Palmer is furious.”

“I saw,” said she.

“I am afraid. For–I know him.”

She looked calmly at him. “But I am not.”

“Then you do not know him.”

The strangest smile flitted across her face.

After a pause Brent said: “Are you married to him?”

Again the calm steady look. Then: “That is none of your business.”

“I thought you were not,” said Brent, as if she had answered his question with a clear negative. He added, “You know I’d not have asked if it had been `none of my business.'”

“What do you mean?”

“If you had been his wife, I could not have gone on. I’ve all the reverence for a home of the man who has never had one. I’d not take part in a home-breaking. But–since you are free—-”

“I shall never be anything else but free. It’s because I wish to make sure of my freedom that I’m going into this.”

Palmer appeared in the doorway.

That night the four and Gourdain dined together, went to the theater and afterward to supper at the Cafe de Paris. Gourdain and young Madame Deliere formed an interesting, unusually attractive exhibit of the parasitism that is as inevitable to the rich as fleas to a dog. Gourdain was a superior man, Clelie a superior woman. There was nothing of the sycophant, or even of the courtier, about either. Yet they already had in their faces that subtle indication of the dependent that is found in all professional people who habitually work for and associate with the rich only. They had no sense of dependence; they were not dependents, for they gave more than value received. Yet so corrupting is the atmosphere about rich people that Gourdain, who had other rich clients, no less than Clelie who got her whole living from Palmer, was at a glance in the flea class and not in the dog class. Brent looked for signs of the same thing in Susan’s face. The signs should have been there; but they were not. “Not yet,” thought he. “And never will be now.”

Palmer’s abstraction and constraint were in sharp contrast to the gayety of the others. Susan drank almost nothing. Her spirits were soaring so high that she did not dare stimulate them with champagne. The Cafe de Paris is one of the places where the respectable go to watch _les autres_ and to catch a real gayety by contagion of a gayety that is mechanical and altogether as unreal as play-acting. There is something fantastic about the official temples of Venus; the pleasure-makers are so serious under their masks and the pleasure-getters so quaintly dazzled and deluded. That is, Venus’s temples are like those of so many other religions in reverence among men–disbelief and solemn humbuggery at the altar; belief that would rather die than be undeceived, in the pews. Palmer scarcely took his eyes from Susan’s face. It amused and pleased her to see how uneasy this made Brent–and how her own laughter and jests aggravated his uneasiness to the point where he was almost showing it. She glanced round that brilliant room filled with men and women, each of them carrying underneath the placidity of stiff evening shirt or the scantiness of audacious evening gown the most fascinating emotions and secrets–love and hate and jealousy, cold and monstrous habits and desires, ruin impending or stealthily advancing, fortune giddying to a gorgeous climax, disease and shame and fear–yet only signs of love and laughter and lightness of heart visible. And she wondered whether at any other table there was gathered so curious an assemblage of pasts and presents and futures as at the one over which Freddie Palmer was presiding somberly. . . . Then her thoughts took another turn. She fell to noting how each man was accompanied by a woman–a gorgeously dressed woman, a woman revealing, proclaiming, in every line, in every movement, that she was thus elaborately and beautifully toiletted to please man, to appeal to his senses, to gain his gracious approval. It was the world in miniature; it was an illustration of the position of woman–of her own position. Favorite; pet. Not the equal of man, but an appetizer, a dessert. She glanced at herself in the glass, mocked her own radiant beauty of face and form and dress. Not really a full human being; merely a decoration. No more; and no worse off than most of the women everywhere, the favorites licensed or unlicensed of law and religion. But just as badly off, and just as insecure. Free! No rest, no full breath until freedom had been won! At any cost, by straight way or devious–free!

“Let’s go home,” said she abruptly. “I’ve had enough of this.”

She was in a dressing gown, all ready for bed and reading, when Palmer came into her sitting-room. She was smoking, her gaze upon her book. Her thick dark hair was braided close to her small head. There was delicate lace on her nightgown, showing above the wadded satin collar of the dressing gown. He dropped heavily into a chair.

If anyone had told me a year ago that a skirt could make a damn fool of me,” said he bitterly, “I’d have laughed in his face. Yet–here I am! How nicely I did drop into your trap today–about the acting!”

“Trap?”

“Oh, I admit I built and baited and set it, myself–ass that I was! But it was your trap–yours and Brent’s, all the same. . . . A skirt–and not a clean one, at that.”

She lowered the book to her lap, took the cigarette from between her lips, looked at him. “Why not be reasonable, Freddie?” said she calmly. Language had long since lost its power to impress her. “Why irritate yourself and annoy me simply because I won’t let you tyrannize over me? You know you can’t treat me as if I were your property. I’m not your wife, and I don’t have to be your mistress.”

“Getting ready to break with me eh?”

“If I wished to go, I’d tell you–and go.”

“You’d give me the shake, would you?–without the slightest regard for all I’ve done for you!”

She refused to argue that again. “I hope I’ve outgrown doing weak gentle things through cowardice and pretending it’s through goodness of heart.”

“You’ve gotten hard–like stone.”

“Like you–somewhat.” And after a moment she added, “Anything that’s strong is hard–isn’t it? Can a man or a woman get anywhere without being able to be what you call `hard’ and what I call `strong’?”

“Where do _you_ want to get?” demanded he.

She disregarded his question, to finish saying what was in her mind–what she was saying rather to give herself a clear look at her own thoughts and purposes than to enlighten him about them. “I’m not a sheltered woman,” pursued she. “I’ve got no one to save me from the consequences of doing nice, sweet, womanly things.”

“You’ve got me,” said he angrily.

“But why lean if I’m strong enough to stand alone? Why weaken myself just to gratify your mania for owning and bossing? But let me finish what I was saying. I never got any quarter because I was a woman. No woman does, as a matter of fact; and in the end, the more she uses her sex to help her shirk, the worse her punishment is. But in my case—-

“I was brought up to play the weak female, to use my sex as my shield. And that was taken from me and–I needn’t tell _you_ how I was taught to give and take like a man–no, not like a man–for no man ever has to endure what a woman goes through if she is thrown on the world. Still, I’m not whining. Now that it’s all over I’m the better for what I’ve been through. I’ve learned to use all a man’s weapons and in addition I’ve got a woman’s.”

“As long as your looks last,” sneered he.

“That will be longer than yours,” said she pleasantly, “if you keep on with the automobiles and the champagne. And when my looks are gone, my woman’s weapons. . .

“Why, I’ll still have the man’s weapons left–shan’t I?–knowledge, and the ability to use it.”

His expression of impotent fury mingled with compelled admiration and respect made his face about as unpleasant to look at as she had ever seen it. But she liked to look. His confession of her strength made her feel stronger. The sense of strength was a new sensation with her–new and delicious. Nor could the feeling that she was being somewhat cruel restrain her from enjoying it.

“I have never asked quarter,” she went on. “I never shall. If fate gets me down, as it has many a time, why I’ll he able to take my medicine without weeping or whining. I’ve never asked pity. I’ve never asked charity. That’s why I’m here, Freddie–in this apartment, instead of in a filthy tenement attic–and in these clothes instead of in rags–and with you respecting me, instead of kicking me toward the gutter. Isn’t that so?”

He was silent.

“Isn’t it so?” she insisted.

“Yes,” he admitted. And his handsome eyes looked the love so near to hate that fills a strong man for a strong woman when they clash and he cannot conquer. “No wonder I’m a fool about you,” he muttered.

“I don’t purpose that any man or woman shall use me,” she went on, “in exchange for merely a few flatteries. I insist that if they use me, they must let me use them. I shan’t be mean about it, but I shan’t be altogether a fool, either. And what is a woman but a fool when she lets men use her for nothing but being called sweet and loving and womanly? Unless that’s the best she can do, poor thing!”

“You needn’t sneer at respectable women.”

“I don’t,” replied she. “I’ve no sneers for anybody. I’ve discovered a great truth, Freddie the deep-down equality of all human beings–all of them birds in the same wind and battling with it each as best he can. As for myself–with money, with a career that interests me, with position that’ll give me any acquaintances and friends that are congenial, I don’t care what is said of me.”

As her plan unfolded itself fully to his understanding, which needed only a hint to enable it to grasp all, he forgot his rage for a moment in his interest and admiration. Said he:

“You’ve used me. Now you’re going to use Brent–eh? Well–what will you give _him_ in exchange?”

“He wants someone to act certain parts in certain plays.”

“Is that _all_ he wants?”

“He hasn’t asked anything else.”

“And if he did?”

“Don’t be absurd. You know Brent.”

“He’s not in love with you,” assented Palmer. “He doesn’t want you that way. There’s some woman somewhere, I’ve heard–and he doesn’t care about anybody but her.”

He was speaking in a careless, casual way, watching her out of the corner of his eye. And she, taken off guard, betrayed in her features the secret that was a secret even from herself. He sprang up with a bound, sprang at her, caught her up out of her chair, the fingers of one hand clasping her throat.

“I thought so!” he hissed. “You love him–damn you! You love him! You’d better look out, both of you!”

There came a knock at the door between her bedroom and that of Madame Clelie. Palmer released her, stood panting, with furious eyes on the door from which the sound had come. Susan called, “It’s all right, Clelie, for the present.” Then she said to Palmer, “I told Clelie to knock if she ever heard voices in this room–or any sound she didn’t understand.” She reseated herself, began to massage her throat where his fingers had clutched it. “It’s fortunate my skin doesn’t mar easily,” she went on. “What were you saying?”

“I know the truth now. You love Brent. That’s the milk in the cocoanut.”

She reflected on this, apparently with perfect tranquillity, apparently with no memory of his furious threat against her and against Brent. She said:

“Perhaps I was simply piqued because there’s another woman.”

“You are jealous.”

“I guess I was–a little.”

“You admit that you love him, you—-”

He checked himself on the first hissing breath of the foul epithet. She said tranquilly:

“Jealousy doesn’t mean love. We’re jealous in all sorts of ways–and of all sorts of things.”

“Well–_he_ cares nothing about _you_.”

“Nothing.”

“And never will. He’d despise a woman who had been—-”

“Don’t hesitate. Say it. I’m used to hearing it, Freddie–and to being it. And not `had been’ but `is.’ I still am, you know.”

“You’re not!” he cried. “And never were–and never could be–for some unknown reason, God knows why.”

She shrugged her shoulders, lit another cigarette. He went on:

“You can’t get it out of your head that because he’s interested in you he’s more or less stuck on you. That’s the way with women. The truth is, he wants you merely to act in his plays.”

“And I want that, too.”

“You think I’m going to stand quietly by and let this thing go on–do you?”

She showed not the faintest sign of nervousness at this repetition, more carefully veiled, of his threat against her–and against Brent. She chose the only hopeful course; she went at him boldly and directly. Said she with amused carelessness:

“Why not? He doesn’t want me. Even if I love him, I’m not giving him anything you want.”

“How do you know what I want?” cried he, confused by this unexpected way of meeting his attack. “You think I’m simply a brute–with no fine instincts or feelings—-”

She interrupted him with a laugh. “Don’t be absurd, Freddie,” said she. “You know perfectly well you and I don’t call out the finer feelings in each other. If either of us wanted that sort of thing, we’d have to look elsewhere.”

“You mean Brent–eh?”

She laughed with convincing derision. “What nonsense!” She put her arms round his neck, and her lips close to his. The violet-gray eyes were half closed, the perfume of the smooth amber-white skin, of the thick, wavy, dark hair, was in his nostrils. And in a languorous murmur she soothed his subjection to a deep sleep with, “As long as you give me what I want from you, and I give you what you want from me why should we wrangle?”

And with a smile he acquiesced. She felt that she had ended the frightful danger–to Brent rather than to herself–that suddenly threatened from those wicked eyes of Palmer’s. But it might easily come again. She did not dare relax her efforts, for in the succeeding days she saw that he was like one annoyed by a constant pricking from a pin hidden in the clothing and searched for in vain. He was no longer jealous of Brent. But while he didn’t know what was troubling him, he did know that he was uncomfortable. XXIII

IN but one important respect was Brent’s original plan modified. Instead of getting her stage experience in France, Susan joined a London company making one of those dreary, weary, cheap and trashy tours of the smaller cities of the provinces with half a dozen plays by Jones, Pinero, and Shaw.

Clelie stayed in London, toiling at the language, determined to be ready to take the small part of French maid in Brent’s play in the fall. Brent and Palmer accompanied Susan; and every day for several hours Brent and the stage manager–his real name was Thomas Boil and his professional name was Herbert Streathern–coached the patient but most unhappy Susan line by line, word by word, gesture by gesture, in the little parts she was playing. Palmer traveled with them, making a pretense of interest that ill concealed his boredom and irritation. This for three weeks; then he began to make trips to London to amuse himself with the sports, amateur and professional, with whom he easily made friends–some of them men in a position to be useful to him socially later on. He had not spoken of those social ambitions of his since Susan refused to go that way with him–but she knew he had them in mind as strongly as ever. He was the sort of man who must have an objective, and what other objective could there be for him who cared for and believed in the conventional ambitions and triumphs only–the successes that made the respectable world gape and grovel and envy?

“You’ll not stick at this long,” he said to Susan.

“I’m frightfully depressed,” she admitted. “It’s tiresome–and hard–and so hideously uncomfortable! And I’ve lost all sense of art or profession. Acting seems to be nothing but a trade, and a poor, cheap one at that.”

He was not surprised, but was much encouraged by this candid account of her state of mind. Said he:

“It’s my private opinion that only your obstinacy keeps you from giving it up straight off. Surely you must see it’s nonsense. Drop it and come along–and be comfortable and happy. Why be obstinate? There’s nothing in it.”

“Perhaps it _is_ obstinacy,” said she. “I like to think it’s something else.”

“Drop it. You want to. You know you do.”

“I want to, but I can’t,” replied she.

He recognized the tone, the expression of the eyes, the sudden showing of strength through the soft, young contour. And he desisted.

Never again could there be comfort, much less happiness, until she had tried out her reawakened ambition. She had given up all that had been occupying her since she left America with Freddie; she had abandoned herself to a life of toil. Certainly nothing could have been more tedious, more tormenting to sensitive nerves, than the schooling through which Brent was putting her. Its childishness revolted her and angered her. Experience had long since lowered very considerably the point at which her naturally sweet disposition ceased to be sweet–a process through which every good-tempered person must pass unless he or she is to be crushed and cast aside as a failure. There were days, many of them, when it took all her good sense, all her fundamental faith in Brent, to restrain her from an outbreak. Streathern regarded Brent as a crank, and had to call into service all his humility as a poor Englishman toward a rich man to keep from showing his contempt. And Brent seemed to be–indeed was–testing her forbearance to the uttermost. He offered not the slightest explanation of his method. He simply ordered her blindly to pursue the course he marked out. She was sorely tempted to ask, to demand, explanations. But there stood out a quality in Brent that made her resolve ooze away, as soon as she faced him. Of one thing she was confident. Any lingering suspicions Freddie might have had of Brent’s interest in her as a woman, or even of her being interested in him as a man, must have been killed beyond resurrection. Freddie showed that he would have hated Brent, would have burst out against him, for the unhuman, inhuman way he was treating her, had it not been that Brent was so admirably serving his design to have her finally and forever disgusted and done with the stage.

Finally there came a performance in which the audience–the gallery part of it–“booed” her–not the play, not the other players, but her and no other. Brent came along, apparently by accident, as she made her exit. He halted before her and scanned her countenance with those all-seeing eyes of his. Said he:

“You heard them?”

“Of course,” replied she.

“That was for you,” said he and he said it with an absence of sympathy that made it brutal.

“For only me,” said she–frivolously.

“You seem not to mind.”

“Certainly I mind. I’m not made of wood or stone.”

“Don’t you think you’d better give it up?”

She looked at him with a steely light from the violet eyes, a light that had never been there before.

“Give up?” said she. “Not even if you give me up. This thing has got to be put through.”

He simply nodded. “All right,” he said. “It will be.”

“That booing–it almost struck me dead. When it didn’t, I for the first time felt sure I was going to win.”

He nodded again, gave her one of his quick expressive, fleeting glances that somehow made her forget and forgive everything and feel fresh and eager to start in again. He said:

“When the booing began and you didn’t break down and run off the stage, I knew that what I hoped and believed about you was true.”

Streathern joined them. His large, soft eyes were full of sympathetic tears. He was so moved that he braved Brent. He said to Susan:

“It wasn’t your fault, Miss Lenox. You were doing exactly as Mr. Brent ordered, when the booing broke out.”

“Exactly,” said Brent.

Streathern regarded him with a certain nervousness and veiled pity. Streathern had been brought into contact with many great men. He had found them, each and every one, with this same streak of wild folly, this habit of doing things that were to him obviously useless and ridiculous. It was a profound mystery to him why such men succeeded while he himself who never did such things remained in obscurity. The only explanation was the abysmal stupidity, ignorance, and folly of the masses of mankind. What a harbor of refuge that reflection has ever been for mediocrity’s shattered and sinking vanity! Yet the one indisputable fact about the great geniuses of long ago is that in their own country and age “the common people heard them gladly.” Streathern could not now close his mouth upon one last appeal on behalf of the clever and lovely and so amiable victim of Brent’s mania.

“I say, Mr. Brent,” pleaded he, “don’t you think–Really now, if you’ll permit a chap not without experience to say so–Don’t you think that by drilling her so much and so–so _beastly_ minutely–you’re making her wooden–machine-like?”

“I hope so,” said Brent, in a tone that sent Streathern scurrying away to a place where he could express himself unseen and unheard.

In her fifth week she began to improve. She felt at home on the stage; she felt at home in her part, whatever it happened to be. She was giving what could really be called a performance. Streathern, when he was sure Brent could not hear, congratulated her. “It’s wonderfully plucky of you, my dear,” said he, “quite amazingly plucky–to get yourself together and go straight ahead, in spite of what your American friend has been doing to you.”

“In spite of it.” cried Susan. “Why, don’t you see that it’s because of what he’s been doing? I felt it, all the time. I see it now.”

“Oh, really–do you think so?” said Streathern.

His tone made it a polite and extremely discreet way of telling her he thought she had become as mad as Brent. She did not try to explain to him why she was improving. In that week she advanced by long strides, and Brent was radiant.

“Now we’ll teach you scales,” said he. “We’ll teach you the mechanics of expressing every variety of emotion. Then we’ll be ready to study a strong part.”

She had known in the broad from the outset what Brent was trying to accomplish–that he was giving her the trade side of the art, was giving it to her quickly and systematically. But she did not appreciate how profoundly right he was until she was “learning scales.” Then she understood why most so called “professional” performances are amateurish, haphazard, without any precision. She was learning to posture, and to utter every emotion so accurately that any spectator would recognize it at once.

“And in time your voice and your body,” said Brent, “will become as much your servants as are Paderewski’s ten fingers. He doesn’t rely upon any such rot as inspiration. Nor does any master of any art. A mind can be inspired but not a body. It must be taught. You must first have a perfect instrument. Then, if you are a genius, your genius, having a perfect instrument to work with, will produce perfect results. To ignore or to neglect the mechanics of an art is to hamper or to kill inspiration. Geniuses–a few–and they not the greatest–have been too lazy to train their instruments. But anyone who is merely talented dares not take the risk. And you–we’d better assume–are merely talented.”

Streathern, who had a deserved reputation as a coach, was disgusted with Brent’s degradation of an art. As openly as he dared, he warned Susan against the danger of becoming a mere machine–a puppet, responding stiffly to the pulling of strings. But Susan had got over her momentary irritation against Brent, her doubt of his judgment in her particular case. She ignored Streathern’s advice that she should be natural, that she should let her own temperament dictate variations on his cut and dried formulae for expression. She continued to do as she was bid.

“If you are _not_ a natural born actress,” said Brent,” at least you will be a good one–so good that most critics will call you great. And if you _are_ a natural born genius at acting, you will soon put color in the cheeks of these dolls I’m giving you–and ease into their bodies–and nerves and muscles and blood in place of the strings.”

In the seventh week he abruptly took her out of the company and up to London to have each day an hour of singing, an hour of dancing, and an hour of fencing. “You’ll ruin her health,” protested Freddie. “You’re making her work like a ditch digger.”

Brent replied, “If she hasn’t the health, she’s got to abandon the career. If she has health, this training will give it steadiness and solidity. If there’s a weakness anywhere, it’ll show itself and can be remedied.”

And he piled the work on her, dictated her hours of sleep, her hours for rest and for walking, her diet–and little he gave her to eat. When he had her thoroughly broken to his regimen, he announced that business compelled his going immediately to America. “I shall be back in a month,” said he.

“I think I’ll run over with you,” said Palmer. “Do you mind, Susan?”

“Clelie and I shall get on very well,” she replied. She would be glad to have both out of the way that she might give her whole mind to the only thing that now interested her. For the first time she was experiencing the highest joy that comes to mortals, the only joy that endures and grows and defies all the calamities of circumstances–the joy of work congenial and developing.

“Yes–come along,” said Brent to Palmer. “Here you’ll be tempting her to break the rules.” He added, “Not that you would succeed. She understands what it all means, now–and nothing could stop her. That’s why I feel free to leave her.”

“Yes, I understand,” said Susan. She was gazing away into space; at sight of her expression Freddie turned hastily away.

On a Saturday morning Susan and Clelie, after waiting on the platform at Euston Station until the long, crowded train for Liverpool and the _Lusitania_ disappeared, went back to the lodgings in Half Moon Street with a sudden sense of the vastness of London, of its loneliness and dreariness, of its awkward inhospitality to the stranger under its pall of foggy smoke. Susan was thinking of Brent’s last words:

She had said, “I’ll try to deserve all the pains you’ve taken, Mr. Brent.”

“Yes, I have done a lot for you,” he had replied. “I’ve put you beyond the reach of any of the calamities of life–beyond the need of any of its consolations. Don’t forget that if the steamer goes down with all on board.”

And then she had looked at him–and as Freddie’s back was half turned, she hoped he had not seen–in fact, she was sure he had not, or she would not have dared. And Brent–had returned her look with his usual quizzical smile; but she had learned how to see through that mask. Then–she had submitted to Freddie’s energetic embrace–had given her hand to Brent–“Good-by,” she had said; and “Good luck,” he.

Beyond the reach of _any_ of the calamities? Beyond the need of _any_ of the consolations? Yes–it was almost literally