take a proper house–a good-sized one, with large grounds–room for building your father a proper laboratory.”
Her dazed and dazzled expression delighted him.
“And you must live better. You must keep at least two servants.”
“But we can’t afford it.”
“Your father has five thousand a year. You have fifteen hundred. That makes sixty-five hundred. The rent of the house and the wages and keep of the servants are a charge against the corporation. So, you can well afford to make yourselves comfortable.”
“I haven’t got used to the idea as yet,” said Dorothea. “Yes–we ARE better off than we were.”
“And you must live better. I want you to get some clothes–and things of that sort.”
She shrank within herself and sat quiet, her gaze fixed upon her hands lying limp in her lap.
“There is no reason why your father shouldn’t be made absolutely comfortable and happy. That’s the way to get the best results from a man of his sort.”
She faded on toward the self-effacing blank he had first known.
“Think it out, Dorothy,” he said in his frankest, kindliest way. “You’ll see I’m right.”
“No,” she said.
“No? What does that mean?”
“I’ve an instinct against it,” replied she. “I’d rather father and I kept on as we are.”
“But that’s impossible. You’ve no right to live in this small, cramping way. You must broaden out and give HIM room to grow. . . . Isn’t that sensible? ”
“It sounds so,” she admitted. “But–” She gazed round helplessly–“I’m afraid!”
“Afraid of what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then don’t bother about it.”
“I’ll have to be very–careful,” she said thoughtfully.
“As you please,” replied he. “Only, don’t live and think on a ten-dollar-a-week basis. That isn’t the way to get on.”
He never again brought up the matter in direct form. But most of his conversation was indirect and more or less subtle suggestions as to ways of branching out. She moved cautiously for a few days, then timidly began to spend money.
There is a notion widely spread abroad that people who have little money know more about the art of spending money and the science of economizing than those who have much. It would be about as sensible to say that the best swimmers are those who have never been near the water, or no nearer than a bath tub. Anyone wishing to be convinced need only make an excursion into the poor tenement district and observe the garbage barrels overflowing with spoiled food–or the trashy goods exposed for sale in the shops and the markets. Those who have had money and have lost it are probably, as a rule, the wisest in thrift. Those who have never had money are almost invariably prodigal– because they are ignorant. When Dorothea Hallowell was a baby the family had had money. But never since she could remember had they been anything but poor.
She did not know how to spend money. She did not know prices or values–being in that respect precisely like the mass of mankind–and womankind–who imagine they are economical because they hunt so-called bargains and haggle with merchants who have got doubly ready for them by laying in inferior goods and by putting up prices in advance. She knew how much ten dollars a week was, the meaning of the twenty to thirty dollars a week her father had made. But she had only a faint–and exaggeratedly mistaken–notion about sixty-five hundred a year–six and a half thousands. It seemed wealth to her, so vast that a hundred thousand a year would have seemed no more. As soon as she drifted away from the known course–the thirty to forty dollars a week upon which they had been living –Dorothea Hallowell was in a trackless sea, with a broken compass and no chart whatever. A common enough experience in America, the land of sudden changes of fortune, of rosiest hopes about “striking it rich,” of carelessness and ignorance as to values, of eager and untrained appetite for luxury and novelty of any and every kind.
At first any expenditure, however small, for the plainest comfort which had been beyond their means seemed a giddy extravagance. But a bank account–AND a check book–soon dissipated that nervousness. A few charge accounts, a little practice in the simple easy gesture of drawing a check, and she was almost at her ease. With people who have known only squalor or with those who have earned their better fortune by privation and slow accumulation, the spreading out process is usually slow–not so slow as it used to be when our merchants had not learned the art of tempting any and every kind of human nature, but still far from rapid. A piece of money reminds them vividly and painfully of the toil put into acquiring it; and they shy away from the pitfall of the facile check. With those born and bred as Dorothy was and elevated into what seems to them affluence by no effort of their own, the spreading is a tropical, overnight affair.
Counting all she spent and arranged to spend in those first few weeks, you had no great total. But it was great for a girl who had been making ten dollars a week. Also there were sown in her mind broadcast and thick the seeds of desire for more luxurious comfort, of need for it, that could never be uprooted.
Norman came over almost every evening. He got a new and youthful and youth-restoring kind of pleasure out of this process of expansion. He liked to hear each trifling detail, and he was always making suggestions that bore immediate fruit in further expenditure. When he again brought up the subject of a larger house, she listened with only the faintest protests. Her ideas of such a short time before seemed small, laughably small now. “Father was worrying only this morning because he is so cramped,” she admitted.
“We must remedy that at once,” said Norman.
And on the following Sunday he and she went house hunting. They found a satisfactory place–peculiarly satisfactory to Norman because it was near the Hudson tunnel, and so only a few minutes from his office. To Dorothy it loomed a mansion, almost a palace. In fact it was a modestly roomy old-fashioned brick house, with a brick stable at the side that, with a little changing, would make an admirable laboratory.
“You haven’t the time–or the experience–to fit this place up,” said Norman. “I’ll attend to it–that is, I’ll have it attended to.” Seeing her uneasy expression, he added: “I can get much better terms. They’d certainly overcharge you. There’s no sense in wasting money–is there?”
“No,” she admitted, convinced.
He gave the order to a firm of decorators. It was a moderate order, considering the amount of work that had to be done. But if the girl had seen the estimates Norman indorsed, she would have been terrified. However, he saw to it that she did not see them; and she, ignorant of values, believed him when he told her the general account of the corporation must be charged with two thousand dollars.
Her alarm took him by surprise. The sum seemed small to him–and it was only about one fifth what the alterations and improvements had cost. Cried she, “Why, that’s more than our whole income for a year has been!”
“You are forgetting these improvements add to the value of the property. I’ve bought it.”
That quieted her. “You are sure you didn’t pay those decorators and furnishers too much?” said she.
“You don’t like their work?” inquired he, chagrined.
“Oh, yes–yes, indeed,” she assured him. “I like plain, solid-looking things. But–two thousand dollars is a lot of money.”
Norman regretted that, as his whole object had been to please her, he had not ordered the more showy cheaper stuff but had insisted upon the simplest, plainest- looking appointments throughout. Even her bedroom furniture, even her dressing table set, was of the kind that suggests cost only to the experienced, carefully and well educated in values and in taste.
“But I’m sure it isn’t fair to charge ALL these things to the company,” she protested. “I can’t allow it. Not the things for my personal use.”
“You ARE a fierce watchdog of a treasurer,” said Norman, laughing at her but noting and respecting the fine instinct of good breeding shown in her absence of greediness, of desire to get all she could. “But I’m letting the firm of decorators take over what you leave behind in the old house. I’ll see what they’ll allow for it. Maybe that will cover the expense you object to.”
This contented her. Nor was she in the least suspicious when he announced that the decorators had made such a liberal allowance that the deficit was but three hundred dollars. “Those chaps,” he explained, “have a wide margin of profit. Besides, they’re eager to get more and bigger work from me.”
A few weeks, and he was enjoying the sight of her ensconced with her father in luxurious comfort–with two servants, with a well-run house, with pleasant gardens, with all that is at the command of an income of six thousand a year in a comparatively inexpensive city. Only occasionally–and then not deeply–was he troubled by the reflection that he was still far from his goal –and had made apparently absurdly little progress toward it through all this maneuvering. The truth was, he preferred to linger when lingering gave him so many new kinds of pleasure. Of those in the large and motley company that sit down to the banquet of the senses, the most are crude, if not coarse, gluttons. They eat fast and furiously, having a raw appetite. Now and then there is one who has some idea of the art of enjoyment–the art of prolonging and varying both the joys of anticipation and the joys of realization.
He turned his attention to tempting her to extravagance in dress. Rut his success there was not all he could have wished. She wore better clothes–much better. She no longer looked the poor working girl, struggling desperately to be neat and clean. She had almost immediately taken on the air of the comfortable classes. Rut everything she got for herself was inexpensive. and she made dresses for herself, and trimmed all her hats. With the hats Norman found no fault. There her good taste produced about as satisfactory results as could have been got at the fashionable milliners–more satisfactory than are got by the women who go there, with no taste of their own beyond a hazy idea that they want “something like what Mrs. So-and-So is wearing.” But homemade dresses were a different matter.
Norman longed to have her in toilettes that would bring out the full beauty of her marvelous figure. He, after the manner of the more intelligent and worldly- wise New York men, had some knowledge of women’s clothes. His sister knew how to dress; Josephine knew how, though her taste was somewhat too sober to suit Norman–at least to suit him in Dorothy. He thought out and suggested dresses to Dorothy, and told her where to get them. Dorothy tried to carry out at home such of his suggestions as pleased her–for, like all women, she believed she knew how to dress herself. Her handiwork was creditable. It would have contented a less exacting and less trained taste than Norman’s. It would have contented him had he not been infatuated with her beauty of face and form. As it was, the improvement in her appearance only served to intensify his agitation. He now saw in her not only all that had first conquered him, but also those unsuspected beauties and graces–and possibilities of beauty and grace yet more entrancing, were she but dressed properly.
“You don’t begin to appreciate how beautiful you are,” said he. It had ever been one of his rules in dealing with women to feed their physical vanity sparingly and cautiously, lest it should blaze up into one of those consuming flames that produce a very frenzy of conceit. But this rule, like all the others, had gone by the board. He could not conceal his infatuation from her, not even when he saw that it was turning her head and making his task harder and harder. “If you would only go over to New York to several dressmakers whose names I’ll give you, I know you’d get clothes from them that you could touch up into something uncommon.”
“I can’t afford it,” said she. “What I have is good enough–and costs more than I’ve the right to pay.” And her tone silenced him; it was the tone of finality, and he had discovered that she had a will.
Never before had Frederick Norman let any important thing drift. And when he started in with Dorothy he had no idea of changing that fixed policy. He would have scoffed if anyone had foretold to him that he would permit the days and the weeks to go by with nothing definite accomplished toward any definite purpose. Yet that was what occurred. Every time he came he had in mind a fixed resolve to make distinct progress with the girl. Every time he left he had a furious quarrel with himself for his weakness. “She is making a fool of me,” he said to himself. “She MUST be laughing at me.” But he returned only to repeat his folly, to add one more to the lengthening, mocking series of lost opportunities.
The truth lay deeper than he saw. He recognized only his own weakness of the infatuated lover’s fatuous timidity. He did not realize how potent her charm for him was, how completely content she made him when he was with her, just from the fact that they were together. After a time an unsatisfied passion often thus diffuses itself, ceases to be a narrow torrent, becomes a broad river whose resistless force is hidden beneath an appearance of sparkling calm. Her ingenuousness amused him; her developing taste and imagination interested him; her freshness, her freedom from any sense of his importance in the world fascinated him, and there was a keener pleasure than he dreamed in the novel sensation of breathing the perfume of what he, the one time cynic, would have staked his life on being unsullied purity. Their relations were to him a delightful variation upon the intimacy of master and pupil. Either he was listening to her or was answering her questions –and the time flew. And there never was a moment when he could have introduced the subject that most concerned him when he was not with her. To have introduced it would have been rudely to break the charm of a happy afternoon or evening.
Was she leading him on and on nowhere deliberately? Or was it the sweet and innocent simplicity it seemed? He could not tell. He would have broken the charm and put the matter to the test had he not been afraid of the consequences. What had he to fear? Was she not in his power? Was she not his, whenever he should stretch forth his hand and claim her? Yes–no doubt –not the slightest doubt. But– He was afraid to break the charm; it was such a satisfying charm.
Then–there was her father.
Men who arrive anywhere in any direction always have the habit of ignoring the nonessential more or less strongly developed. One reason–perhaps the chief reason–why Norman had got up to the high places of material success at so early an age was that he had an unerring instinct for the essential and wasted no time or energy upon the nonessential. In his present situation Dorothy’s father, the abstracted man of science, was one of the factors that obviously fell into the nonessential class. Norman knew little about him, and cared less. Also, he took care to avoid knowing him. Knowing the father would open up possibilities of discomfort– But, being a wise young man, Norman gave this matter the least possible thought.
Still, it was necessary that the two men see something of each other. Hallowell discovered nothing about Norman, not enough about his personal appearance to have recognized him in the street far enough away from the laboratory to dissociate the two ideas. Human beings–except his daughter–did not interest Hallowell; and his feeling for her was somewhat in the nature of an abstraction. Norman, on the other hand, was intensely interested in human beings; indeed, he was interested in little else. He was always thrusting through surfaces, probing into minds and souls. He sought thoroughly to understand the living machines he used in furthering his ambitions and desires. So it was not long before he learned much about old Newton Hallowell–and began to admire him–and with a man of Norman’s temperament to admire is to like.
He had assumed at the outset that the scientist was more or less the crank. He had not talked with him many times before he discovered that, far from being in any respect a crank, he was a most able and well- balanced mentality–a genius. The day came when, Dorothy not having returned from a shopping tour, he lingered in the laboratory talking with the father, or, rather, listening while the man of great ideas unfolded to him conceptions of the world that set his imagination to soaring.
Most of us see but dimly beyond the ends of our noses, and visualize what lies within our range of sight most imperfectly. We know little about ourselves, less about others. We fancy that the world and the human race always have been about as they now are, and always will be. History reads to us like a fairy tale, to which we give conventional acceptance as truth. As to the future, we can conceive nothing but the continuation of just what we see about us in the present. Norman, practical man though he was, living in and for the present, had yet an imagination. He thought Hallowell a kind of fool for thinking only of the future and working only for it–but he soon came to think him n divine fool. And through Hallowell’s spectacles he was charmed for many an hour with visions of the world that is to be when, in the slow but steady processes of evolution, the human race will become intelligent, will conquer the universe with the weapons of science and will make it over.
When he first stated his projects to Norman, the young man had difficulty in restraining his amusement. A new idea, in any line of thought with which we are not familiar, always strikes us as ridiculous. Norman had been educated in the ignorant conventional way still in high repute among the vulgar and among those whose chief delight is to make the vulgar gape in awe. He therefore had no science, that is, no knowledge–outside his profession–but only what is called learning, though tommyrot would be a fitter name for it. He had only the most meager acquaintance with that great fundamental of a sound and sane education, embryology. He knew nothing of what science had already done to destroy all the still current notions about the mystery of life and birth. He still laughed, as at a clever bit of legerdemain, when Hallowell showed him how far science had progressed toward mastery of the life of the lower forms of existence–how those “worms” could be artificially created, could be aged, made young again, made diseased and decrepit, restored to perfect health, could be swung back and forth or sideways or sinuously along the span of existence–could even be killed and brought back to vigor.
“We’ve been at this sort of thing only a few years,” said Hallowell. “I rather think it will not be many years now before we shall not even need the initial germ of life to enable us to create but can do it by pure chemical means, just as a taper is lighted by holding a match to it.”
Norman ceased to think of sleight-of-hand.
“Life,” continued the juggler, transformed now into practical man, leader of men, “life has been demonstrated to be simply one of the forms of energy, or one of the consequences of energy. The final discovery is scientifically not far away. Then–” His eyes lighted up.
“Then what?” asked Norman.
“Then immortality–in the body. Eternal youth and health. A body that is renewable much as any of our inanimate machines of the factory is renewable. Why not? So far as we know, no living thing ever dies except by violence. Disease–old age–they are quite as much violence as the knife and the bullet. What science can now do with these `worms,’ as my daughter calls them–that it will be able to do with the higher organisms.”
“And the world would soon be jammed to the last acre,” objected Norman.
Hallowell shrugged his shoulders. “Not at all. There will be no necessity to create new people, except to take the place of those who may be accidentally obliterated.”
“But the world is dying–the earth, itself, I mean.”
“True. But science may learn how to arrest that cooling process–or to adapt man to it. Or, it may be that when the world ceases to be inhabitable we shall have learned how to cross the star spaces, as I think I’ve suggested before. Then–we should simply find a planet in its youth somewhere, and migrate to it, as a man now moves to a new house when the old ceases to please him.”
“That is a long flight of the fancy,” said Norman.
“Long–but no stronger than the telegraph or the telephone. The trouble with us is that we have been long stupefied by the ignorant theological ideas of the universe–ideas that have come down to us from the childhood of the race. We haven’t got used to the new era–the scientific era. And that is natural. Why, until less than three generations ago there was really no such thing as science.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” admitted Norman. “We certainly have got on very fast in those three generations.”
“Rather fast. Not so fast, however, as we shall in the next three. Science–chemistry–is going speedily to change all the conditions of life because it will turn topsy-turvy all the ways of producing things–food, clothing, shelter. Less than two generations ago men lived much as they had for thousands of years. But it’s very different to-day. It will be inconceivably different to-morrow.”
Norman could not get these ideas out of his brain. He began to understand why Hallowell cared nothing about the active life of the day–about its religion, politics, modes of labor, its habits of one creature preying upon another. To-morrow, not religion, not politics, but chemistry, not priests nor politicians, but chemists, would change all that–and change it by the only methods that compel. An abstract idea of liberty or justice can be rejected, evaded, nullified. But a telephone, a steam engine, a mode of prolonging life–those realizations of ideas COMPEL.
When Dorothy came, Norman went into the garden with her in a frame of mind so different from any he had ever before experienced that he scarcely recognized himself. As the influence of the father’s glowing imagination of genius waned before the daughter’s physical loveliness and enchantment for him, he said to himself, “I’ll keep away from him.” Why? He did not permit himself to go on to examine into his reasons. But he could not conceal them from himself quickly enough to hide the knowledge that they were moral.
“What is the matter with you to-day?” said Dorothy. “You are not a bit interesting.”
“Interested, you mean,” he said with a smile of raillery, for he had long since discovered that she was not without the feminine vanity that commands the centering of all interest in the woman herself and resents any wandering of thought as a slur upon her own powers of fascination.
“Well, interested then,” said she. “You are thinking about something else.”
“Not now,” he assured her.
But he left early. No sooner had he got away from the house than the scientific dreaming vanished and he wished himself back with her again–back where every glance at her gave him the most exquisite sensations. And when he came the following day he apparently had once more restored her father to his proper place of a nonessential. All that definitely remained of the day before’s impression was a certain satisfaction that he was aiding with his money an enterprise of greater value and of less questionable character than merely his own project. But the powerful influences upon our life and conduct are rarely direct and definite. He, quite unconsciously, had a wholly different feeling about Dorothy because of her father, because of what his new knowledge of and respect for her father had revealed and would continue to reveal to him as to the girl herself–her training, her inheritance, her character that could not but be touched with the splendor of the father’s noble genius. And long afterward, when the father as a distinct personality had been almost forgotten, Nor- man was still, altogether unconsciously, influenced by him–powerfully, perhaps decisively influenced. Norman had no notion of it, but ever after that talk in the laboratory, Dorothy Hallowell was to him Newton Hallowell’s daughter.
When he came the following day, with his original purposes and plans once more intact, as he thought, he found that she had made more of a toilet than usual, had devised a new way of doing her hair that enabled him to hang a highly prized addition in his memory gallery of widely varied portraits of her.
The afternoon was warm. They sat under a big old tree at the end of the garden. He saw that she was much disturbed–and that it had to do with him. From time to time she looked at him, studying his face when she thought herself unobserved. As he had learned that it is never wise to open up the disagreeable, he waited. After making several futile efforts at conversation, she abruptly said:
“I saw Mr. Tetlow this morning–in Twenty-third Street. I was coming out of a chemical supplies store where father had sent me.”
She paused. But Norman did not help her. He continued to wait.
“He–Mr. Tetlow–acted very strangely,” she went on. “I spoke to him. He stared at me as if he weren’t going to speak–as if I weren’t fit to speak to.”
“Oh!” said Norman.
“Then he came hurrying after me. And he said, `Do you know that Norman is to be married in two weeks?’ ”
“So!” said Norman.
“And I said, `What of it? How does that interest me?’ ”
“It didn’t interest you?”
“I was surprised that you hadn’t spoken of it,” replied she. “But I was more interested in Mr. Tetlow’s manner. What do you think he said next?”
“I can’t imagine,” said Norman.
“Why–that I was even more shameless than he thought. He said: `Oh, I know all about you. I found out by accident. I shan’t tell anyone, for I can’t help loving you still. But it has killed my belief in woman to find out that YOU would sell yourself.’ ”
She was looking at Norman with eyes large and grave. “And what did you say?” he inquired.
“I didn’t say anything. I looked at him as if he weren’t there and started on. Then he said, `When Norman abandons you, as he soon will, you can count on me, if you need a friend.’ ”
There was a pause. Then Norman said, “And that was all?”
“Yes,” replied she.
Another pause. Norman said musingly: “Poor Tetlow! I’ve not seen him since he went away to Bermuda–at least he said he was going there. One day he sent the firm a formal letter of resignation. . . . Poor Tetlow! Do you regret not having married him?”
“I couldn’t marry a man I didn’t love.” She looked at him with sweet friendly eyes. “I couldn’t even marry you, much as I like you.”
Norman laughed–a dismal attempt at ease and raillery.
“When he told me about your marrying,” she went on, “I knew how I felt about you. For I was not a bit jealous. Why haven’t you ever said anything about it?”
He disregarded this. He leaned forward and with curious deliberateness took her hand. She let it lie gently in his. He put his arm round her and drew her close to him. She did not resist. He kissed her upturned face, kissed her upon the lips. She remained passive, looking at him with calm eyes.
“Kiss me,” he said.
She kissed him–without hesitation and without warmth.
“Why do you look at me so?” he demanded.
“I can’t understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Why you should wish to kiss me when you love another woman. What would she say if she knew?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. And I rather think I don’t care. You are the only person on earth that interests me.”
“Then why are you marrying?”
“Let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about ourselves.” He clasped her passionately, kissed her at first with self-restraint, then in a kind of frenzy. “How can you be so cruel!” he cried. “Are you utterly cold?”
“I do not love you,” she said.
“Why not?”
“There’s no reason. I–just don’t. I’ve sometimes thought perhaps it was because you don’t love me.”
“Good God, Dorothy! What do you want me to say or do?”
“Nothing,” replied she calmly. “You asked me why I didn’t love you, and I was trying to explain. I don’t want anything more than I’m getting. I am content–aren’t you?”
“Content!” He laughed sardonically. “As well ask Tantalus if he is content, with the water always before his eyes and always out of reach. I want you –all you have to give. I couldn’t be content with less.”
“You ought not to talk to me this way,” she reproved gently, “when you are engaged.”
He flung her hand into her lap. “You are making a fool of me. And I don’t wonder. I’ve invited it. Surely, never since man was created has there been such another ass as I.” He drew her to her feet, seized her roughly by the shoulders. “When are you coming to your senses?” he demanded.
“What do you mean?” she inquired, in her child- like puzzled way.
He shook her, kissed her violently, held her at arm’s length. “Do you think it wise to trifle with me?” he asked. “Don’t your good sense tell you there’s a limit even to such folly as mine?”
“What IS the matter?” she asked pathetically. “What do you want? I can’t give you what I haven’t got to give.”
“No,” he cried. “But I want what you HAVE got to give.”
She shook her head slowly. “Really, I haven’t, Mr. Norman.”
He eyed her with cynical amused suspicion. “Why did you call me MR. Norman just then? Usually you don’t call me at all. It’s been weeks since you have called me Mister. Was your doing it just then one of those subtle, adroit, timely tricks of yours?”
She was the picture of puzzled innocence. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“Well–perhaps you don’t,” said he doubtfully. “At any rate, don’t call me Mr. Norman. Call me Fred.”
“I can’t. It isn’t natural. You seem Mister to me. I always think of you as Mr. Norman.”
“That’s it. And it must stop!”
She smiled with innocent gayety. “Very well– Fred. . . . Fred. . . . Now that I’ve said it, I don’t find it strange.” She looked at him with an expression between appeal and mockery. “If you’d only let me get acquainted with you. But you don’t. You make me feel that I’ve got to be careful with you–that I must be on my guard. I don’t know against what–for you are certainly the very best friend that I’ve ever had– the only real friend.”
He frowned and bit his lip–and felt uncomfortable, though he protested to himself that he was simply irritated at her slyness. Yes, it must be slyness.
“So,” she went on, “there’s no REASON for being on guard. Still, I feel that way.” She looked at him with sweet gravity. “Perhaps I shouldn’t if you didn’t talk about love to me and kiss me in a way I feel you’ve no right to.”
Again he laid his hands upon her shoulders. This time he gazed angrily into her eyes. “Are you a fool? Or are you making a fool of me?” he said. “I can’t decide which.”
“I certainly am very foolish,” was her apologetic answer. “I don’t know a lot of things, like you and father. I’m only a girl.”
And he had the maddening sense of being baffled again–of having got nowhere, of having demonstrated afresh to himself and to her his own weakness where she was concerned. What unbelievable weakness! Had there ever been such another case? Yes, there must have been. How little he had known of the possibil- ities of the relations of men and women–he who had prided himself on knowing all!
She said, “You are going to marry?”
“I suppose so,” replied he sourly.
“Are you worried about the expense? Is it costing you too much, this helping father? Are you sorry you went into it?”
He was silent.
“You are sorry?” she exclaimed. “You feel that you are wasting your money?”
His generosity forbade him to keep up the pretense that might aid him in his project. “No,” he said hastily. “No, indeed. This expense–it’s nothing.” He flushed, hung his head in shame before his own weakness, as he added, in complete surrender, “I’m very glad to be helping your father.”
“I knew you would be!” she cried triumphantly. “I knew it!” And she flung her arms round his neck and kissed him.
“That’s better!” he said with a foolishly delighted laugh. “I believe we are beginning to get acquainted.”
“Yes, indeed. I feel quite different already.”
“I hoped so. You are coming to your senses?”
“Perhaps. Only–” She laid a beautiful white pleading hand upon his shoulder and gazed earnestly into his eyes–“please don’t frighten me with that talk –and those other kisses.”
He looked at her uncertainly. “Come round in your own way,” he said at last. “I don’t want to hurry you. I suppose every bird has its own way of dropping from a perch.”
“You don’t like my way?” she inquired.
It was said archly but also in the way that always made him vaguely uneasy, made him feel like one facing a mystery which should be explored cautiously. “It is graceful,” he admitted, with a smile since he could not venture to frown. “Graceful–but slow.”
She laughed–and he could not but feel that the greater laughter in her too innocent eyes was directed at him. She talked of other things–and he let her– charmed, yet cursing his folly, his slavery, the while.
X
MANY a time he had pitied a woman for letting him get away from her, when she obviously wished to hold him and failed solely because she did not understand her business. Like every other man, he no sooner began to be attracted by a woman than he began to invest her with a mystery and awe which she either could dissipate by forcing him to see the truth of her commonplaceness or could increase into a power that would enslave him by keeping him agitated and interested and ever satisfied yet ever baffled. But no woman had shown this supreme skill in the art of love–until Dorothy Hallowell. She exasperated him. She fascinated him. She kept him so restless that his professional work was all but neglected. Was it her skill? Was it her folly? Was she simply leading him on and on, guided blindly by woman’s instinct to get as much as she could and to give as little as she dared? Or was she protected by a real indifference to him–the strongest, indeed the only invulnerable armor a woman can wear? Was she protecting herself? Or was it merely that he, weakened by his infatuation, was doing the protecting for her?
Beside these distracting questions, the once all- important matter of professional and worldly ambition seemed not worth troubling about. They even so vexed him that he had become profoundly indifferent as to Josephine. He saw her rarely. When they were alone he either talked neutral subjects or sat almost mute, hardly conscious of her presence. He received her efforts at the customary caressings with such stolidity that she soon ceased to annoy him. They reduced their outward show of affection to a kiss when they met, another when they separated. He was tired–always tired –worn out–half sick–harassed by business concerns. He did not trouble himself about whether his listless excuses would be accepted or not. He did not care what she thought–or might think–or might do.
Josephine was typical of the women of the comfortable class. For them the fundamentally vital matters of life–the profoundly harassing questions of food, clothing, and shelter–are arranged and settled. What is there left to occupy their minds? Little but the idle emotions they manufacture and spread foglike over their true natures to hide the barrenness, the monotony. They fool with phrases about art or love or religion or charity–for none of those things can be vivid realities to those who are swathed and stupefied in a luxury they have not to take the least thought to provide for themselves. Like all those women, Josephine fancied herself complex–fancied she was a person of variety and of depth because she repeated with a slight change of wording the things she read in clever books or heard from clever men. There seemed to Norman to be small enough originality, personality, to the ordinary man of the comfortable class; but there was some, because his necessity of struggling with and against his fellow men in the several arenas of active life compelled him to be at least a little of a person. In the women there seemed nothing at all–not even in Josephine. When he listened to her, when he thought of her, now–he was calmly critical. He judged her as a human specimen–judged much as would have old Newton Hallowell to whom the whole world was mere laboratory.
She bored him now–and he made no effort beyond bare politeness to conceal the fact from her. The situation was saved from becoming intolerable by that universal saver of intolerable situations, vanity. She had the ordinary human vanity. In addition, she had the peculiar vanity of woman, the creation of man’s flatteries lavished upon the sex he alternately serves and spurns. In further addition, she had the vanity of her class–the comfortable class that feels superior to the mass of mankind in fortune, in intellect, in taste, in everything desirable. Heaped upon all these vanities was her vanity of high social rank–and atop the whole her vanity of great wealth. None but the sweetest and simplest of human beings can stand up and remain human under such a weight as this. If we are at all fair in our judgments of our fellow men, we marvel that the triumphant class–especially the women, whose point of view is never corrected by the experiences of practical life–are not more arrogant, more absurdly forgetful of the oneness and the feebleness of humanity.
Josephine was by nature one of the sweet and simple souls. And her love for Norman, after the habit of genuine love, had destroyed all the instinct of coquetry. The woman–or, the man–has to be indeed interesting, indeed an individuality, to remain interesting when sincerely in love, and so elevated above the petty but potent sex trickeries. Josephine, deeply in love, was showing herself to Norman in her undisguised natural sweet simplicity–and monotony. But, while men admire and reverence a sweet and simple feminine soul– and love her in plays and between the covers of a book and when she is talking highfaluting abstractions of morality–and wax wroth with any other man who ignores or neglects her–they do not in their own persons become infatuated with her. Passion is too much given to moods for that; it has a morbid craving for variety, for the mysterious and the baffling.
The only thing that saves the race from ruin through passion is the rarity of those by nature or by art expert in using it. Norman felt that he was paying the penalty for his persistent search for this rarity; one of the basest tricks of destiny upon man is to give him what he wants–wealth, or fame, or power, or the wom- an who enslaves. Norman felt that destiny had suddenly revealed its resolve to destroy him by giving him not one of the things he wanted, but all.
The marriage was not quite two weeks away. About the time that the ordinary plausible excuses for Norman’s neglect, his abstraction, his seeming indifference were exhausted, Josephine’s vanity came forward to explain everything to her, all to her own glory. As the elysian hour approached–so vanity assured her–the man who loved her as her complex soul and many physical and social advantages deserved was overcome with that shy terror of which she had read in the poets and the novelists. A large income, fashionable attire and surroundings, a carriage and a maid–these things gave a woman a subtle and superior intellect and soul. How? Why? No one knew. But everyone admitted, indeed saw, the truth. Further, these beings–these great ladies–according to all the accredited poets, novelists, and other final authorities upon life–always inspired the most awed and worshipful and diffident feelings in their lovers. Therefore, she–the great lady–was getting but her due. She would have liked something else –something common and human–much better. But, having always led her life as the conventions dictated, never as the common human heart yearned, she had no keen sense of dissatisfaction to rouse her to revolt and to question. Also, she was breathlessly busy with trousseau and the other arrangements for the grand wedding.
One afternoon she telephoned Norman asking him to come on his way home that evening. “I particularly wish to see you,” she said. He thought her voice sounded rather queer, but he did not take sufficient interest to speculate about it. When he was with her in the small drawing room on the second floor, he noted that her eyes were regarding him strangely. He thought he understood why when she said:
“Aren’t you going to kiss me, Fred?”
He put on his good-natured, slightly mocking smile. “I thought you were too busy for that sort of thing nowadays.” And he bent and kissed her waiting lips. Then he lit a cigarette and seated himself on the sofa beside her–the sofa at right angles to the open fire. “Well?” he said.
She gazed into the fire for full a minute before she said in a voice of constraint, “What became of that– that girl–the Miss Hallowell—-”
She broke off abruptly. There was a pause choked with those dizzy pulsations that fill moments of silence and strain. Then with a sob she flung herself against his breast and buried her face in his shoulder. “Don’t answer!” she cried. “I’m ashamed of myself. I’m ashamed–ashamed!”
He put his arm about her shoulders. “But why shouldn’t I answer?” said he in the kindly gentle tone we can all assume when a matter that agitates some one else is wholly indifferent to us.
“Because–it was a–a trap,” she answered hysterically. “Fred–there was a man here this afternoon –a man named Tetlow. He got in only because he said he came from you.”
Norman laughed quietly. “Poor Tetlow!” he said. “He used to be your head clerk–didn’t he?”
“And one of my few friends.”
“He’s not your friend, Fred!” she cried, sitting upright and speaking with energy that quivered in her voice and flashed in her fine brown eyes. “He’s your enemy–a snake in the grass–a malicious, poisonous—-”
Norman’s quiet, even laugh interrupted. “Oh, no,” said he. “Tetlow’s a good fellow. Anything he said would be what he honestly believed–anything he said about me.”
“He pleaded that he was doing it for your good,” she went on with scorn. “They always do–like the people that write father wicked anonymous letters. He –this man Tetlow–he said he wanted me for the sake of my love for you to save you from yourself.”
Norman glanced at her with amused eyes. “Well, why don’t you? But then you ARE doing it. You’re marrying me, aren’t you?”
Again she put her head upon his shoulder. “Indeed I am!” she cried. “And I’d be a poor sort if I let a sneak shake my confidence in you.”
He patted her shoulder, and there was laughter in his voice as he said, “But I never professed to be trustworthy.”
“Oh, I know you USED to–” She laughed and kissed his cheek. “Never mind. I’ve heard. But while you were engaged to me–about to marry me–why, you simply couldn’t!”
“Couldn’t what?” inquired he.
“Do you want me to tell you what he said?”
“I think I know. But do as you like.”
“Maybe I’d better tell you. I seem to want to get rid of it.”
“Then do.”
“It was about that girl.” She sat upright and looked at him for encouragement. He nodded. She went on: “He said that if I asked you, you would not dare deny you were–were–giving her money.”
“Her and her father.”
She shrank, startled. Then her lips smiled bravely, and she said, “He didn’t say anything about her father.”
“No. That was my own correction of his story.”
She looked at him with wonder and doubt. “You aren’t–DOING it, Fred!” she exclaimed.
He nodded. “Yes, indeed.” He looked at her placidly. “Why not?”
“You are SUPPORTING her?”
“If you wish to put it that way,” said he carelessly. “My money pays the bills–all the bills.”
“Fred!”
“Yes? What is it? Why are you so agitated?” He studied her face, then rose, took a final pull at the cigarette, tossed it in the fire. “I must be going,” he said, in a cool, even voice.
She started up in a panic. “Fred! What do you mean? Are you angry with me?”
His calm regard met hers. “I do not like–this sort of thing,” he said.
“But surely you’ll explain. Surely I’m entitled to an explanation.”
“Why should I explain? You have evidently found an explanation that satisfies you.” He drew himself up in a quiet gesture of haughtiness. “Besides, it has never been my habit to allow myself to be questioned or to explain myself.”
Her eyes widened with terror. “Fred!” she gasped. “What DO you mean?”
“Precisely what I say,” said he, in the same cool, inevitable way. “A man came to you with a story about me. You listened. A sufficient answer to the story was that I am marrying you. That answer apparently does not content you. Very well. I shall make no other.”
She gazed at him uncertainly. She felt him going –and going finally. She seized him with desperate fingers, cried: “I AM content. Oh, Fred–don’t frighten me this way!”
He smiled satirically. “Are you afraid of the scandal–because everything for the wedding has gone so far?”
“How can you think that!” cried she–perhaps too vigorously, a woman would have thought.
“What else is there for me to think? You certainly haven’t shown any consideration for me.”
“But you told me yourself that you were false to me.”
“Really? When?”
She forgot her fear in a gush of rage rising from sudden realization of what she was doing–of how leniently and weakly and without pride she was dealing with this man. “Didn’t you admit—-”
“Pardon me,” said he, and his manner might well have calmed the wildest tempest of anger. “I did not admit. I never admit. I leave that to people of the sort who explain and excuse and apologize. I simply told you I was paying the expenses of a family named Hallowell.”
“But WHY should you do it, Fred?”
His smile was gently satirical. “I thought Tetlow told you why.”
“I don’t believe him!”
“Then why this excitement?”
One could understand how the opposition witnesses dreaded facing him. “I don’t know just why,” she stammered. “It seemed to me you were admitting– I mean, you were confirming what that man accused you of.”
“And of what did he accuse me? I might say, of what do YOU accuse me?” When she remained silent he went on: “I am trying to be reasonable, Josephine. I am trying to keep my temper.”
The look in her eyes–the fear, the timidity–was a startling revelation of character–of the cowardice with which love undermines the strongest nature. “I know I’ve been foolish and incoherent, Fred,” she pleaded. “But–I love you! And you remember how I always was afraid of that girl.”
“Just what do you wish to know?”
“Nothing, dear–nothing. I am not sillily jealous. I ought to be admiring you for your generosity–your charity.”
“It’s neither the one nor the other,” said he with exasperating deliberateness.
She quivered. “Then WHAT is it?” she cried. “You are driving me crazy with your evasions.” Pleadingly, “You must admit they ARE evasions.”
He buttoned his coat in tranquil preparation to depart. She instantly took alarm. “I don’t mean that. It’s my fault, not asking you straight out. Fred, tell me–won’t you? But if you are too cross with me, then–don’t tell me.” She laughed nervously, hiding her submission beneath a seeming of mocking exaggeration of humility. “I’ll be good. I’ll behave.”
A man who admired her as a figure, a man who liked her, a man who had no feeling for her beyond the general human feeling of wishing well pretty nearly everybody–in brief, any man but one who had loved her and had gotten over it would have deeply pitied and sympathized with her. Fred Norman said, his look and his tone coolly calm:
“I am backing Mr. Hallowell in a company for which he is doing chemical research work. We are hatching eggs, out of the shell, so to speak. Also we are aging and rejuvenating arthropods and the like. So far we have declared no dividends. But we have hopes.”
She gave a hysterical sob of relief. “Then it’s only business–not the girl at all!”
“Oh, yes, it’s the girl, too,” replied he. “She’s an officer of the company. In fact, it was to make a place for her that I went into the enterprise originally.” With an engaging air of frankness he inquired, “Anything more?”
She was gazing soberly, almost somberly, into the fire. “You’ll not be offended if I ask you one question?”
“Certainly not.”
“Is there anything between you and–her?”
“You mean, am I having an affair with her?”
She hung her head, but managed to make a slight nod of assent.
He laughed. “No.” He laughed again. “No– not thus far, my dear.” He laughed a third time, with still stronger and stranger mockery. “She congratulated me on my engagement with a sincerity that would have piqued a man who was interested in her.”
“Will you forgive me?” Josephine said. “What I’ve just been feeling and saying and putting you through–it’s beneath both of us. I suppose a woman –no woman–can help being nasty where another woman is concerned.”
With his satirical good-humored smile, “I don’t in the least blame you.”
“And you’ll not think less of me for giving way to a thing so vulgar?”
He kissed her with a carelessness that made her wince But she felt that she deserved it–and was grateful. He said: “Why don’t you go over and see for yourself? No doubt Tetlow gave you the address –and no doubt you have remembered it.”
She colored and hastily turned her head. “Don’t punish me,” she pleaded.
“Punish you? What nonsense! . . . Do you want me to take you over? The laboratory would interest you–and Miss Hallowell is lovelier than ever. She has an easier life now. Office work wears on women terribly.”
Josephine looked at him with a beautiful smile of love and trust. “You wish to be sure I’m cured. Well, can’t you see that I am?”
“I don’t see why you should be. I’ve said nothing one way or the other.”
She laughed gayly. “You can’t tempt me. I’m really cured. I think the only reason I had the attack was because Mr. Tetlow so evidently believed he was speaking the truth.”
“No doubt he did think he was. I’m sure, in the same circumstances, I’d think of anyone else just what he thinks of me.”
“Then why do you do it, Fred?” urged she with ill-concealed eagerness. “It isn’t fair to the girl, is it?”
“No one but you and Tetlow knows I’m doing it.”
“You’re mistaken there, dear. Tetlow says a great many people down town are talking about it–that they say you go almost every day to Jersey City to see her. He accuses you of having ruined her reputation. He says she is quite innocent. He blames the whole thing upon you.”
Norman, standing with arms folded upon his broad chest, was gazing thoughtfully into the fire.
“You don’t mind my telling you these things?” she said anxiously. “Of course, I know they are lies—-”
“So everyone is talking about it,” interrupted he, so absorbed that he had not heard her.
“You don’t realize how conspicuous you are.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, it can’t be helped.”
“You can’t afford to be mixed up in a scandal,” she ventured, “or to injure a poor little creature– I’m afraid you’ll have to–to stop it.”
“Stop it.” His eyes gleamed with mirth and something else. “It isn’t my habit to heed gossip.”
“But think of HER, Fred!”
He smiled ironically. “What a generous, thoughtful dear you are!” said he.
She blushed. “I’ll admit I don’t like it. I’m not jealous–but I wish you weren’t doing it.”
“So do I!” he exclaimed, with sudden energy that astonished and disquieted her. “So do I! But since it can’t be helped I shall go on.”
Never had she respected him so profoundly. For the first time she had measured strength with him and had been beaten and routed. She fancied herself enormously proud; for she labored under the common delusion which mistakes for pride the silly vanity of class, or birth, or wealth, or position. She had imagined she would never lower that cherished pride of hers to any man. And she had lowered it into the dust. No wonder women had loved him, she said to herself; couldn’t he do with them, even the haughtiest of them, precisely as he pleased? He had not tried to calm, much less to end her jealousy; on the contrary, he had let it flame as high as it would, had urged it higher. And she did not dare ask him, even as a loving concession to her weakness, to give up an affair upon which everybody was putting the natural worst possible construction! On the contrary, she had given him leave to go on– because she feared–yes, knew–that if she tried to interfere he would take it as evidence that they could not get on together. What a man!
But there was more to come that day. As he was finishing dressing for dinner his sister Ursula knocked. “May I come, Frederick?” she said.
“Sure,” he cried. “I’m fixing my tie.”
Ursula, in a gown that displayed the last possible –many of the homelier women said impossible–inch of her beautiful shoulders, came strolling sinuously in and seated herself on the arm of the divan. She watched him, in his evening shirt, as he with much struggling did his tie. “How young you do look, Fred!” said she. “Especially in just that much clothes. Not a day over thirty.”
“I’m not exactly a nonogenarian,” retorted he.
“But usually your face–in spite of its smoothness and no wrinkles–has a kind of an old young–or do I mean young old?–look. You’ve led such a serious life.”
“Um. That’s the devil of it.”
“You’re looking particularly young to-night.”
“Same to you, Urse.”
“No, I’m not bad for thirty-four. People half believe me when I say I’m twenty-nine.” She glanced complacently down at her softly glistening shoulders. “I’ve still got my skin.”
“And a mighty good one it is. Best I ever saw– except one.”
She reflected a moment, then smiled. “I know it isn’t Josephine’s. Hers is good but not notable. Eyes and teeth are her strongholds. I suppose it’s–the other lady’s.”
“Exactly.”
“I mean the one in Jersey City.”
He went on brushing his hair with not a glance at the bomb she had exploded under his very nose.
“You’re a cool one,” she said admiringly.
“Cool?”
“I thought you’d jump. I’m sure you never dreamed I knew.”
He slid into his white waistcoat and began to button it.
“Though you might know I’d find out,” she went on, “when everyone’s talking.”
“Everyone’s always talking,” said he indifferently.
“And they rattle on to beat the band when they get a chance at a man like you. Do you know what they’re saying?”
“Certainly. Loosen these straps in the back of my waistcoat–the upper ones, won’t you?”
As she fussed with the buckles she said: “But you don’t know that they say you’re going to pieces– neglecting your cases–keeping away from your office –wasting about half of your day with your lady love. They say that you have gone stark mad–that you are rushing to ruin.”
“A little looser. That’s better. Thanks.”
“And everyone’s wondering when Josephine will hear and go on the rampage. She’s so proud and so stuck on herself that they’re betting she’ll give you the bounce.”
“Well–” getting into his coat–“you’d delight in that. For you don’t like her.”
“Oh–so–so,” replied Ursula. “She’s all right, as women go. You know we women don’t ever think any too well of each other. We’re `on.’ Now, I’m frank to admit I’m not worth the powder to blow me up. I can’t do anything worth doing. I don’t know anything worth knowing–except how to dress and make a fool of an occasional man. I’m not a good house- keeper, nor a good wife–and I’d as lief go to jail for two years as have a baby. But I admit I’m n. g. Most women are as poor excuses as I am, yet they think they’re GRAND!”
Norman, standing before his sister and smiling mysteriously, said: “My dear Urse, let me give you a great truth in a sentence. The value of anything is not its value to itself or in itself, but its value to some one else. A woman–even as incompetent a person as you—-”
“Or Josephine.”
“–or Josephine–may seem to some man to be pricelessly valuable. And if she happens to seem so to him, why, she IS so.”
“Meaning–Jersey City?”
His eyes glittered curiously. “Meaning Jersey City,” he said.
A long silence. Then Ursula: “But suppose Josephine hears?”
He stood beside the doorway, waiting for her to pass out. His face expressed nothing. “Let’s go down. I’m hungry. We were talking about it this afternoon.”
“You and Jo!”
“Josephine and I.”
“And it’s all right?”
“Why not?”
“You fooled her?”
“I don’t stoop to that sort of thing.”
“No, indeed,” she laughed. “You rise to heights of deception that would make anyone else giddy. Oh, I’d give anything to have heard.”
“There’s nothing to deceive about,” said he.
She shook her head. “You can’t put it over me, Fred. You’ve never before made a fool of yourself about a woman. I’d like to see her. I suppose I’d be amazed. I’ve observed that the women who do the most extraordinary things with men are the most ordinary sort of women.”
“Not to the men,” said he bitterly. “Not while they’re doing it.”
“Does SHE seem extraordinary to YOU still?”
He thrust his hands deep in his pockets. “What you heard is true. I’m letting everything slide–work –career–everything. I think of nothing else. Ursula, I’m mad about her–mad!”
She threw back her head, looked at him admiringly. Never had she so utterly worshiped this wonderful, powerful brother of hers. He was in love–really– madly in love–at last. So he was perfect! “How long do you think it will hold, Fred?” she said, all sympathy.
“God knows!”
“Yet–caring for her you can go on and marry another woman!”
He looked at his sister cynically. “You wouldn’t have me marry HER, would you?”
“Of course not,” protested she hastily. Her passion for romance did not carry her to that idiocy. “You couldn’t. She’s a sort of working girl–isn’t she?–anyhow, that class. No, you couldn’t marry her. But how can you marry another woman?”
“How could I give up Josephine?–and give her up probably to Bob Culver?”
Ursula nodded understandingly. “But–what are you going to do?”
“How should I know? Perhaps break it off when I marry–if you can call it breaking off, when there’s nothing to break but–me.”
“You don’t mean–” she cried, stopping when her tone had carried her meaning.
He laughed. “Yes–that’s the kind of damn fool I’ve been.”
“You must have let her see how crazy you were about her.”
“Was anyone ever able to hide that sort of insanity?”
Ursula gazed wonderingly at him, drew a long breath. “You!” she exclaimed. “Of all men–you!”
“Let’s go down.”
“She must be a deep one–dangerous,” said Ursula, furious against the woman who was daring to resist her matchless brother. “Fred, I’m wild to see her. Maybe I’d see something that’d help cure you.”
“You keep out of it,” he replied, curtly but not with ill humor.
“It can’t last long.”
“It’d do for me, if it did.”
“The marriage will settle everything,” said Ursula with confidence.
“It’s got to,” said he grimly.
XI
THE next day or the next but one Dorothy telephoned him. He often called her up on one pretext or another, or frankly for no reason at all beyond the overwhelming desire to hear her voice. But she had never before “disturbed” him. He had again and again assured her that he would not regard himself as “disturbed,” no matter what he might be doing. She would not have it so. As he was always watching for some faint sign that she was really interested in him, this call gave him a thrill of hope–a specimen of the minor absurdities of those days of extravagant folly.
“Are you coming over to-day?” she asked.
“Right away, if you wish.”
“Oh, no. Any time will do.”
“I’ll come at once. I’m not busy.”
“No. Late this afternoon. Father asked me to call up and make sure. He wants to see you.”
“Oh–not you?”
“I’m a business person,” retorted she. “I know better than to annoy you, as I’ve often said.”
He knew it was foolish, tiresome; yet he could not resist the impulse to say, “Now that I’ve heard your voice I can’t stay away. I’ll come over to lunch.”
Her answering voice was irritated. “Please don’t. I’m cleaning house. You’d be in the way.”
He shrank and quivered like a boy who has been publicly rebuked. “I’ll come when you say,” he replied.
“Not a minute before four o’clock.”
“That’s a long time–now you’ve made me crazy to see you.”
“Don’t talk nonsense. I must go back to work.”
“What are you doing?” he asked, to detain her.
“Dusting and polishing. Molly did the sweeping and is cleaning windows now.”
“What have you got on?”
“How silly you are!”
“No one knows that better than I. But I want to have a picture of you to look at.”
“I’ve got on an old white skirt and an old shirt waist, both dirty, and a pair of tennis shoes that were white once but are gray now, where they aren’t black. And I’ve got a pink chiffon rag tied round my hair.”
“Pink is wonderful when you wear it.”
“I look a fright. And my face is streaked–and my arms.”
“Oh, you’ve got your sleeves rolled up. That’s an important detail.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“No, I’m thinking of your arms. They are– ravishing.”
“That’s quite enough. Good-by.”
And she rang off. He was used to her treating compliment and flattery from him in that fashion. He could not–or was it would not?–understand why. He had learned that she was not at all the indifferent and unaware person in the matter of her physical charms he had at first fancied her. On the contrary, she had more than her share of physical vanity–not more than was her right, in view of her charms, but more than she could carry off well. With many a secret smile he had observed that she thought herself perfect physically. This did not repel him; it never does repel a man–when and so long as he is under the enchantment of the charms the woman more or less exaggerates. But, while he had often seen women with inordinate physical vanity, so often that he had come to regarding it as an essential part of feminine character, never before had he seen one so content with her own good opinion of herself that she was indifferent to appreciation from others.
He did not go back to the office after lunch. Several important matters were coming up; if he got within reach they might conspire to make it impossible for him to be with her on time. If his partners, his clients knew! He the important man of affairs kneeling at the feet of a nobody!–and why? Chiefly because he was unable to convince her that he amounted to anything. His folly nauseated him. He sat in a corner in the dining room of the Lawyers’ Club and drank one whisky and soda after another and brooded over his follies and his unhappiness, muttering monotonously from time to time: “No wonder she makes a fool of me. I invite it, I beg for it, damned idiot that I am!” By three o’clock he had drunk enough liquor to have dispatched the average man for several days. It had produced no effect upon him beyond possibly a slight aggravation of his moodiness.
It took only twenty minutes to get from New York to her house. He set out at a few minutes after three; arrived at twenty minutes to four. As experience of her ways had taught him that she was much less friendly when he disobeyed her requests, he did not dare go to the house, but, after looking at it from a corner two blocks away, made a detour that would use up some of the time he had to waste. And as he wandered he indulged in his usual alternations between self-derision and passion. He appeared at the house at five minutes to four. Patrick, who with Molly his wife looked after the domestic affairs, was at the front gate gazing down the street in the direction from which he always came. At sight of him Pat came running. Norman quickened his pace, and every part of his nervous system was in turmoil.
“Mr. Hallowell–he’s–DEAD,” gasped Pat.
“Dead?” echoed Norman.
“Three quarters of an hour ago, sir. He came from the lobatry, walked in the sitting room where Miss Dorothy was oiling the furniture and I was oiling the floor. And he sets down–and he looks at her–as cool and calm as could be–and he says, `Dorothy, my child, I’m dying.’ And she stands up straight and looks at him curious like–just curious like. And he says, `Dorothy, good-by.’ And he shivers, and I jumps up just in time to catch him from rolling to the floor. He was dead then–so the doctor says.”
“Dead!” repeated Norman, looking round vaguely.
He went on to the house, Pat walking beside him and chattering on and on–a stream of words Norman did not hear. As he entered the open front door Dorothy came down the stairs. He had thought he knew how white her skin was. But he did not know until then. And from that ghostly pallor looked the eyes of grief beyond tears. He advanced toward her. But she seemed to be wrapped in an atmosphere of aloofness. He felt himself a stranger and an alien. After a brief silence she said: “I don’t realize it. I’ve been upstairs where Pat carried him–but I don’t realize it. It simply can’t be.”
“Do you know what he wished to say to me?” he asked.
“No. I guess he felt this coming. Probably it came quicker than he expected. Now I can see that he hasn’t been well for several days. But he would never let anything about illness be said. He thought talking of those things made them worse.”
“You have relatives–somebody you wish me to telegraph?”
She shook her head. “No one. Our relatives out West are second cousins or further away. They care nothing about us. No, I’m all alone.”
The tears sprang to his eyes. But there were no tears in her eyes, no forlornness in her voice. She was simply stating a fact. He said: “I’ll look after everything. Don’t give it a moment’s thought.”
“No, I’ll arrange,” replied she. “It’ll give me something to do–something to do for him. You see, it’s my last chance.” And she turned to ascend the stairs. “Something to do,” she repeated dully. “I wish I hadn’t cleaned house this morning. That would be something more to do.”
This jarred on him–then brought the tears to his eyes again. How childish she was!–and how desolate! “But you’ll let me stay?” he pleaded. “You’ll need me. At any rate, I want to feel that you do.”
“I’d rather you didn’t stay,” she said, in the same calm, remote way. “I’d rather be alone with him, this last time. I’ll go up and sit there until they take him away. And then–in a few days I’ll see what to do –I’ll send for you.”
“I can’t leave you at such a time,” he cried. “You haven’t realized yet. When you do you will need some one.”
“You don’t understand,” she interrupted. “He and I understood each other in some ways. I know he’d not want–anyone round.”
At her slight hesitation before “anyone” he winced.
“I must be alone with him,” she went on. “Thank you, but I want to go now.”
“Not just yet,” he begged. Then, seeing the shadow of annoyance on her beautiful white face, he rose and said: “I’m going. I only want to help you.” He extended his hand impulsively, drew it back before she had the chance to refuse it. For he felt that she would refuse it. He said, “You know you can rely on me.”
“But I don’t need anybody,” replied she. “Good-by.”
“If I can do anything—-”
“Pat will telephone.” She was already halfway upstairs.
He found Pat in the front yard, and arranged with him to get news and to send messages by way of the drug store at the corner, so that she would know nothing about it. He went to a florist’s in New York and sent masses of flowers. And then–there was nothing more to do. He stopped in at the club and drank and gambled until far into the morning. He fretted gloomily about all the next day, riding alone in the Park, driving with his sister, drinking and gambling at the club again and smiling cynically to himself at the covert glances his acquaintances exchanged. He was growing used to those glances. He cared not the flip of a penny for them.
On the third day came the funeral, and he went. He did not let his cabman turn in behind the one carriage that followed the hearse. At the graveyard he stood afar off, watching her in her simple new black, noting her calm. She seemed thinner, but he thought it might be simply her black dress. He could see no change in her face. As she was leaving the grave, she looked in his direction but he was uncertain whether she had seen him. Pat and Molly were in the big, gloomy looking carriage with her.
He ventured to go to the front gate an hour later. Pat came out. “It’s no use to go in, Mr. Norman,” he said. “She’ll not see you. She’s shut up in her own room.”
“Hasn’t she cried yet, Pat?”
“Not yet. We’re waiting for it, sir. We’re afraid her mind will give way. At least, Molly is. I don’t think so. She’s a queer young lady–as queer as she looks–though at first you’d never think it. She’s always looking different. I never seen so many persons in one.”
“Can’t Molly MAKE her cry?–by talking about him?”
“She’s tried, sir. It wasn’t no use. Why, Miss Dorothy talks about him just as if he was still here.” Pat wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I’ve been in many a house of mourning, but never through such a strain as this. Somehow I feel as if I’d never before been round where there was anyone that’d lost somebody they REALLY cared about. Weeping and moaning don’t amount to much beside what she’s doing.”
Norman stayed round for an hour or more, then rushed away distracted. He drank like a madman– drank himself into a daze, and so got a few hours of a kind of sleep. He was looking haggard and wild now, and everyone avoided him, though in fact there was not the least danger of an outburst of temper. His sister–Josephine–the office–several clients telephoned for him. To all he sent the same refusal–that he was too ill to see anyone. Not until the third day after the funeral did Dorothy telephone for him.
He took an ice-cold bath, got himself together as well as he could, and reached the house in Jersey City about half past three in the afternoon. She came gliding into the room like a ghost, trailing a black negligee that made the whiteness of her skin startling. Her eye- lids were heavy and dark, but unreddened. She gazed at him with calm, clear melancholy, and his heart throbbed and ached for her. She seated herself, clasped her hands loosely in her lap, and said:
“I’ve sent for you so that I could settle things up.”
“Your father’s affairs? Can’t I do it better?”
“He had arranged everything. There are only the papers–his notes–and he wrote out the addresses of the men they were to be sent to. No, I mean settle things up with you.”
“You mustn’t bother about that,” said he. “Besides, there’s nothing to settle.”
“I shan’t pretend I’m going to try to pay you back,” she went on, as if he had not spoken. “I never could do it. But you will get part at least by selling this furniture and the things at the laboratory.”
“Dorothy–please,” he implored. “Don’t you understand you’re to stay on here, just the same? What sort of man do you think I am? I did this for you, and you know it.”
“But I did it for my father,” replied she, “and he’s gone.” She was resting her melancholy gaze upon him. “I couldn’t take anything from you. You didn’t think I was that kind?”
He was silent.
“I cared nothing about the scandal–what people said–so long as I was doing it for him. . . . I’d have done ANYTHING for him. Sometimes I thought you were going to compel me to do things I’d have hated to do. I hope I wronged you, but I feared you meant that.” She sat thinking several minutes, sighed wearily. “It’s all over now. It doesn’t matter. I needn’t bother about it any more.”
“Dorothy, let’s not talk of these things now,” said Norman. “There’s no hurry. I want you to wait until you are calm and have thought everything over. Then I’m sure you’ll see that you ought to stay on.”
“How could I?” she asked wonderingly.
“Why not? Am I demanding anything of you? You know I’m not–and that I never shall.”
“But there’s no reason on earth why YOU should support ME. I can work. Why shouldn’t I? And if I didn’t, if I stayed on here, what sort of woman would I be?”
He was unable to find an answer. He was trying not to see a look in her face–or was it in her soul, revealed through her eyes?–a look that made him think for the first time of a resemblance between her and her father.
“You see yourself I’ve got to go. Any money I could earn wouldn’t more than pay for a room and board somewhere.”
“You can let me advance you money while you–” He hesitated, had an idea which he welcomed eagerly– “while you study for the stage. Yes, that’s the sensible thing. You can learn to act. Then you will be able to make a decent living.”
She slowly shook her head. “I’ve no talent for it –and no liking. No, Mr. Norman, I must go back to work–and right away.”
“But at least wait until you’ve looked into the stage business,” he urged. “You may find that you like it and that you have talent for it.”
“I can’t take any more from you,” she said.
“You think I am not to be trusted. I’m not going to say now how I feel toward you. But I can honestly say one thing. Now that you are all alone and unprotected, you needn’t have the least fear of me.”
She smiled faintly. “I see you don’t believe me. Well, it doesn’t matter. I’ve seen Mr. Tetlow and he has given me a place at twelve a week in his office.”
Norman sank back in his chair. “He is in for himself now?”
“No. He’s head clerk for Pitchley & Culver.”
“Culver!” exclaimed Norman. “I don’t want you to go into Culver’s office. He’s a scoundrel.”
Again Dorothy smiled faintly. Norman colored. “I know he stands well–as well as I do. But I can’t trust you with him. That sounds ridiculous but–it’s true.”
“I think I can trust myself,” she said quietly. Her grave regard fixed his. “Don’t you?” she asked.
His eyes lowered. “Yes,” he replied. “But–why shouldn’t you come back with us? I’ll see that you get a much better position than Culver’s giving you.”
Over her face crept one of those mysterious transformations that made her so bafflingly fascinating to him. Behind that worldly-wise, satirical mask was she mocking at him? All she said was: “I couldn’t work there. I’ve settled it with Mr. Tetlow. I go to work to-morrow.”