Through the red flame-days of October she danced before him, a tantalizing heart of thistledown. If she settled, it was always well ahead. When he came up with her and stooped, thinking her capture certain, some new breeze of caprice or reticence would sweep her beyond the reach of his grasp.
They discussed love in generalizations—in terms of life, literature and the latest play. They discussed very little else.
“When I’m married———-” he would say.
“Well?” she would encourage him, snuggling her face against her white-fox furs.
“When I am married, every day’ll be a new romance. I can live anywhere I like—that’s the beauty of being an artist. I think I shall live in Italy first, somewhere on the Bay of Naples. I and my wife” (how her eyes would twinkle when he said that!), “I and my wife will dress up every evening. We’ll have a different set of costumes for every night in the week, and we’ll dine out in an arbor in our little garden. Sometimes she’ll be a Dresden Shepherdess, and sometimes a Queen Guinevere, and sometimes——-”
“And won’t she ever be herself?”
“She’ll always be that, with a beauty-patch just about where you wear yours and a little curl bobbing against her neck.”
“But what’s the idea of so many costumes?”
“We shall never get used to each other; we shall always seem to be loving for the first time—beginning all afresh.—Doesn’t it attract you, Princess?”
“Me? I don’t see what I’ve got to do with it. Here’s the kind of woman you’ll marry: a nice little thing without any ambitions, who’ll think you’re a genius. You’ll live in one house forever and ever, and have a large family and go to church every Sunday. And you’ll have a dead secret that you’ll never be able to tell her, about a famous actress whom you once romped with in New York before she was famous.”
She had a thousand ways of turning him aside from confession.
“Men are rotters—all men except you, Meester Deek. Poor little Fluffy! Horace isn’t at all nice to her.”
It transpired on inquiry that Horace wasn’t at all nice to Fluffy because she was dividing her leisure between himself and Simon Freelevy.
“You see, she must,” Desire explained. “It’s business. October isn’t the success they expected—it’s too English in its atmosphere. If Freelevy likes her, he can put her into his biggest productions. Horace won’t understand that it’s business. He sulks and makes rows. That’s why I go about with her so much—her little chaperone, she calls me. Men have to be polite and can’t take advantage when a young girl is present.”
“But what does she give them in return?” Teddy asked.
Desire became cold. “Any man should feel proud to be seen in her company.”
Her way of saying it made him feel that all women were queens and all men their servitors. His idea that love-affairs ended in marriage seemed rustic and adolescent. To be seen in the company of a pretty face was all the reward a man ought to expect for limousines, late suppers, tantalized hopes and the patient devotion of an honorable passion. He couldn’t bear that Desire should class herself with the nuns of pleasure, who dole out their lure as payment, and have blocks of ice where less virtuous women have hearts. In her scornful defense of Fluffy, she seemed to be building up a case for herself.
In the last extremity, when a proposal of marriage threatened, she employed a still more effective weapon.
“Look here, Meester Deek, I like you most awfully and we’ve had some splendid times, but why are you stopping in America?”
He would gaze into her eyes dumbly, thinking, “Now’s my chance.”
His hesitancy would infect her with boldness. “If it’s for my sake, I’m not worth the trouble. I think you’d better go back to England. The Lusitania’s sailing tomorrow.”
Piqued by her assumed indifference, he would pretend to take her at her word: “Perhaps I had better. Would you come to see me off?”
“Maybe.”
“And kiss me good-by?”
“If I felt like it.”
“Then it’s almost worth going.”
“Why don’t you?”
Once he gave her a fright They were passing The International Sleeping Car Company on Fifth Avenue. “I think I will,” he said lightly.
Entering, he made a reservation and paid the deposit money. During the next hour she was so sweet to him, so sad, that they raced back through the thickening night, arriving just as the last clerk was leaving, and canceled the booking.
“Did you mean it?” she whispered.
“Well, didn’t I?”
“But do tell me,” she pleaded. “If you don’t, I shall never be at rest.”
He slipped his arm into hers without rebuff. “Odd little, dear little Princess, was it likely?”
After that, when in this mood of self-effacement, she would insist without fear of being taken seriously that he should sail.
“If you don’t, I’ll refuse to see you ever again. But,” she would add, “that’s only if you really are stopping here on my account.”
To relieve her conscience of responsibility he would lie like a corsair, bolstering up the fiction that business was his sole reason for remaining.
“Then, it’s your funeral, isn’t it?”
“My funeral,” he echoed solemnly.
The Indian summer sank into a heap of ashes from which all heat was spent. November looked in with its thin-lipped mornings and its sudden pantherlike dusks. Still they wandered, separate and yet together, from the refuge of one day to the next, establishing shrines of habit which made them less and less dispensable to each other’s happiness. She was always darting ahead into the uncertain shadows, hiding, and springing out that she might test his gladness in having refound her.
Each new day was an exquisite wax-statue which by night had melted to formlessness in his hands. He made repeated resolutions to organize his energies. He lived im-paradised in a lethargy of fond emotions. His career was at a halt; his opportunities were slipping from him. To encourage his industry he drew up a chart of the hours in the current month that he would work. He pinned it to the wall above his desk that it might reproach him if he fell below his average. The average was never reached. The chart was tom up. His most stalwart plans were driven as mist before the breath of her lightest fancy. Not that she encroached on him by deed or word; but her memory was a delirium which kept him always craving for her presence.
“If you were to drop me to-morrow,” she told him, “you’d never hear from me. I’m like that. I shouldn’t run after you.”
She left him to place his own construction on the statement—to discover its origin in nobility or carelessness. Whichever it was, it made him the needle while she remained the magnet. When he wasn’t with her, he was waiting for her; so the hours after midnight, when he had seen her home, were the only ones free from feverishness. His work suffered; he stole from the hours when he ought to have been in bed. He began to suspect that he was losing his confidence of touch. The suspicion was sharply confirmed when one of his commissioned articles came back with the cryptic intimation that it wasn’t exactly what the editor had expected. That meant the loss of five hundred dollars; what was worse, it filled him with artistic panic.
In the old days—the days of Life Till Twenty-one—fame had been the goal of his ambitions. He had set before his eyes, as though it were a crucifix, the austere aloofness of his father’s pure motives. He couldn’t afford to do that any longer. He was spending lavishly; the example of the extravagance of Fluffy’s lovers spurred his expenditures. He didn’t care how he won Desire’s admiration; win it he must. Unconsciously he was trying to win it with a display of generosity. Dimly he foresaw that he was doing her an injustice; he would have to cut down and recuperate the moment they were married. In preparation he painted to her the joys of simplicity and of life in the country. Her curl became agitated with merriment.
“That isn’t the way I’ve been brought up. Cottages don’t have bathrooms, and the country’s muddy except in summer. It wouldn’t suit me. And I do like to wear silk.” Then, with a shudder: “Poverty’s so ugly. There’s only one thing worse, and that’s growing old. Please, Meester Deek, let’s talk of something else.”
She was like a child, stopping her ears with her fingers and pleading, “Please don’t tell me any more ghost-stories.” He felt sorry for her; at such times she seemed so inexperienced and young. By her misplaced valuations, she was giving life such power to hurt her. Her sophistication seemed more apparent than real—a disguise for her lack of knowledge. He wanted to comfort her against old age. If one were loved, neither poverty nor growing old mattered. He thought of Dearie and the way she had married his father, with their joint affection and her high belief in him for their sole assets.
There were times when Desire seemed to guess his problem.
“I wish you’d do more work. Why don’t you leave me alone to-morrow? And you oughtn’t to keep on spending and spending. I’d be just as happy if you spent less.”
The joy of her thoughtfulness gave him hope and made him the more reckless. Besides, it wasn’t possible to economize in her company. Her fear of the subway and her abhorrence of crowded surface-cars made taxis a continual necessity. Her shoes were so thin that a mile of walking tired her; her clothes were so stylish that she would have looked conspicuous in any but a fashionable setting. Her method of dress, in which he delighted, limited them both to costly environments. He had named her rightly years ago in calling her “Princess.”
Vashti puzzled him. She seemed to avoid him. When he visited the apartment she was out, just going out or expected back shortly. He had fugitive glimpses of her hurrying off to concert engagements, or going on some pleasure jaunt with the unexplained Mr. Dak, similar to those which he and Desire enjoyed together.
Mr. Kingston Dak was a little grasshopper of a man. He had lemon-colored hair, white teeth, extremely well-kept hands and was nearly forty. His littleness was evidently a sore point with him, for the heels of his shoes were built up like a woman’s. He held himself erectly and when others were seated he usually remained standing. He seemed to be always in search of something to lean against which would enable him to tiptoe unobtrusively and to add another inch to his stature. He was clean-shaven, and in appearance shy and boyish; he would have looked excellently well in clerical attire. By hobby he was an occultist; by profession a stockbroker. His chief topic of conversation was the superiority of Mohammedanism to Christianity.
Desire called him “King” familiarly; Vashti referred to him as “My little broker.” Although in his early twenties he had been divorced and tattered by the thorns of a disastrous passion, neither of them seemed to regard him as dangerously masculine. They treated him as a maiden-aunt—as a pale person receiving affection in lieu of wages, expected to safeguard their comfort and to slip into a cupboard when he wasn’t wanted.
“King’s quite nice,” Desire told Teddy; “he was most awfully fond of her. His troubles have made him so understanding.”
Teddy wondered what had happened to the world that all its women had become Vestal Virgins and all its men unassailable St. Anthonies. He watched Mr. Dak for any sign that he remembered the days of his flesh. The little man was as perfunctory over his duties as a well-trained lackey.
Vashti’s bearing towards himself during their brief meetings was affectionately sentimental. There was a hint of the proprietary in the way she touched him, as though she regarded him already as her son. Her eyes would rest on him with veiled inquiry; she never put her question into words. She was giving him his chance, and he felt infinitely grateful to her—so grateful that he was blind to the unexplained situations which surrounded her. That she should allow his unchaperoned relations with Desire endowed her with broadmindedness. “Unto the pure all things are pure,” seemed the maxim on which she acted. In accepting that ruling for his own conduct, he had to extend the same leniency to Mr. Dak’s.
Desire stretched it a point further and made it apply to herself. He found that frequently after he had said “Good-by” to her at close on midnight, Fluffy would call with a car and carry her off to make a party of three at supper, or sometimes to join a larger party—mostly of men—in her apartment. He remonstrated with her: “It’s all very well for an actress; but I hate to think of you mixing with all kinds of people whose standards are just anyhow, and playing ’gooseberry’ for two people older than yourself.”
“I don’t see that you can complain,” she laughed. “If my standards weren’t theatrical and if I were the kind of girl who sees evil in everything, you wouldn’t be allowed to go about with me so much.”
There was his dilemma in a nut-shell. In joining the ranks of the superiorly pure, he was pledged to see purity everywhere. Divorces were pure. Nobody was to blame for anything. People ought to be sympathized with, not punished, when they got into trouble. He seemed to have made lax conventions his own by taking advantage of them for facilitating his courtship. It would look like hypocrisy to disapprove of them after marriage. It was very jolly, for instance, to hear her whisper in the jingling secrecy of a hansom, “Meester Deek, please light me a cigarette.” Very jolly to convey it from his lips to hers, and to watch the red glow of each puff make a cameo of her face against the blackness. But—— And that but was perpetually walking round new corners to confront him—if she were his wife, would the sight of her smoking afford him such abiding happiness? She had taunted him with being a King Arthur. In the presence of her emotional tolerance, which found excuses for everything and ostracized nobody, his sense of propriety seemed a lack of social charity. He guessed the reason for her continual plea that people should be forgiving—her mother. The knowledge silenced his criticisms and roused his compassion.
Two moods possessed him alternately: in the one he despised himself as an austere person, in whom an undue restraint of upbringing had dammed the stream of youth, so that it lay alone and unruffled as a mountain-tarn; in the other he saw himself as a man with a chivalrous duty.
Little by little he came to see that her faery lightheartedness, her faculty for taking no thought for the morrow, made her an easy prey for the morrow. Her ease in acquiring new friendships made friendship of small value.
Her butterfly Sittings from pleasure to pleasure left her without garnerings. She lived, he calculated, at the rate of at least five thousand dollars per annum. But different people paid for it; she contributed as her share her gay well-dressed schoolgirl self. The chances were that she rarely had a five-dollar bill in her purse, and yet she was accustoming herself to extravagance.
He began to watch her friends. When he ran over the list of them, he found that they were all temporary, held by the flimsiest bonds of common knowledge. They had been met at hotels, in pensions, on transatlantic voyages. A good many of them were divorced or unattached persons. They were all on the wing; none of them seemed to comply with any settled code of morals. The more he saw of her, the more aghast he became at the precariousness of her prosperity. Some day these friends, who could dispense with her for months together, would happen all to dispense with her at the same moment Then the telephone, which was her wizard summons to dinners, balls, and motor-parties, would suddenly grow silent. She would wait and listen; and listen and wait; her round of gayeties would be ended. Perhaps this thirst for the insubstantial things of life was a part of the price which Hal had mentioned. Did she know it? Winged creature as she was, she must covet the security of a nest sometimes, though, while she was without it, she affected to despise it as dullness.
When he married her—— He became lost in thought
If they went on living as they were living now, his career would be torn to shreds by her unsatisfied energy. They would have to settle down. In putting up with any irritations that might result, he’d be helping her to pay the penalty—the penalty which Vashti had imposed on so many lives—on her own most of all—by her early selfishness. Towering above his passion and mingling with it oddly, was the great determination to save her from the ruinous lightness to which her mother’s undefined social position had committed her.
She was fully aware of the unspoken strictures which lent melancholy to his ardor.
“You think I’m a silly little moth. I know you do. I’m pyschic. You think I’m fluttering about a candle and that my wings’ll get scorched. Just you wait. I’ll have to show you.”
Or she would say, leaning out towards him, “I wonder what it is that you like about me, Meester Deek. There are so many things you don’t like, though you never tell me. You don’t like my powdering, or my smoking cigarettes, or—oh, such lots of things. But where’s the harm? And there’s another thing you won’t like—I’m going to dye my hair to auburn.”
This threat, that she would dye her hair, led to endless conversations. It made him bold to tell her how pretty she was, which was exactly what she wanted.
Sometimes she was sweetly grown up, preparing him for disillusionment; but it was when she was little that he loved her best Then she would give him the most artless confidences; telling him about her religion, how she prayed for him night and morning, and of her longings to know her father. She would plead with him to tell her about Orchid Lodge and Mrs. Sheerug, and Ruddy, and Harriet She came to picture the old house as if she had lived there, and yet she was never tired of hearing the old details afresh. Orchid Lodge became a secret between them—one of their many secrets, like the name she had given him. And still they drifted undecided.
Then the series of events happened which forced their love to its first anchorage.