THE GIRL OUTSIDE
Tony Adriance slipped into the habit of pausing for a few words with the
girl in black whenever circumstances set them opposite each other. And
that was quite often, since his home was so near the pavilion she had
adopted as her place of repose. He rather avoided his friends, during
the days following his futile rebellion against Lucille Masterson's
will, yet he was lonely and eager to escape thought. He could talk to
the girl, he admitted to himself, because she did not know him.
They met with a casual frankness, the girl and he, like two men who find
each other congenial, yet whose lives lie far apart. Their brief
conversations were intimate without being inquisitively personal. She
had a trick of saying things that lingered in the memory; at least, in
his memory. Not that she was especially brilliant; her charm was her
earnestness, at once vivid and tranquil, and the odd glamor of
enchantment she threw over plain commonsense, making it no longer
plain, but alluring as folly.
But she continued to wear the shabby little boots, with their optimistic
bravery of blacking. They really were respectable boots, aging, not
aged. The fault lay with Adriance, not them; he was too much accustomed
to women "whose sandals delighted his eyes." If her feet had been less
childishly small, they might have preoccupied him less. As it was, they
preoccupied him more and more.
There is no accepted way of offering a pair of shoes to a feminine
acquaintance. Nevertheless, in the third week of his friendship with the
girl, Adriance bought a pair of pumps for her. He had seen them in a
glass case set out before a shop and stopped to gaze, astonished. They
were so unmistakably hers; the size, the rounded lines, the very arch
and tilt were right! They were of shining black, with Spanish heels and
glinting buckles.
He took them home with him, but of course he dared not give them to her.
He had an idea that he might essay the venture on the last occasion of
their meeting; if she punished him with banishment, then, it would not
matter. For he meant to leave New York when Lucille went to Florida. He
would spend the necessary interval between the divorce and his marriage,
in Canada, alone.
Meanwhile, there was the girl.
It was on the last day of October that he found her knitting instead of
embroidering; a web of gay scarlet across her knees.
"A new suit for Holly's big Teddybear," she explained, as he sat down
opposite to her. "Christmas is coming, you know. I like to have all
ready in advance. Don't you think the color should become a brown-plush
bear?"
"It is not depressing."
"It is the color of holly. And depression is not a sensation to
cultivate, is it?" She paused to gaze across the river, already shadowed
by approaching evening. "I believe in fighting it off with both hands;
driving a spear right through the ugly thing and holding it up like Sir
Sintram with that wriggly monster in the old picture."
"You would be a good one to be in trouble with," he said abruptly.
She disentangled his meaning from the extremely vague speech, and nodded
serious assent.
"Yes, perhaps. I'm used to making the most of things."
"The best of them," he corrected.
"Of course! The most best--why should anyone make more worst?"
They laughed together. But directly the restless unhappiness flowed back
into his eyes.
"They do, though!" he exclaimed.
"Then they are wrong, all wrong," she said decidedly. "They should set
themselves right the moment they find it out."
"But if they can't?" he urged, with a personal heat and protest. "Things
aren't so simple as all that. Suppose they can't set one thing straight
without knocking over a lot of others? You _cannot_ go cutting and
slashing through like that!"
"Oh, yes; you can," she contradicted, sitting very upright, her gray
eyes fired. "You must; anyone must. It is cowardly to let things,
crooked things, grow and grow. And one could not knock down anything
worth while that easily. Good things are strong."
He shook his head. But she had stirred him so that he sat silent for a
while, then rather suddenly rose to take his leave.
"You never told me your name," he remarked, looking down at her. He
noticed again how supple and deft her fingers were, and their capable
swiftness at the work.
"No. Why?" she replied simply.
"I don't know," he accepted the rebuke. "I--beg your pardon."
"Oh, certainly. Holly is trying to shake hands before you go."
Of course he and the baby had become friends. He carefully yielded his
forefinger to the clutching hands, but he did not smile as usual.
"Look here," he spoke out brusquely. "Just as an illustration that
things are not as easily kept straight as you seem to think--I know a
man who somehow got to following one woman around. I don't think he
knows quite how. Of course, he admired her immensely, and liked her.
Well, I suppose he felt more than that! But he never even imagined
making love to her, because she was married. You see, he was a fool. One
day when he called, she told him that she was going to get a divorce
from her husband. She has the right. And the man found she expected to
marry him, afterward; she thought he had meant that all along. What
could he do? What can he do?"
The baby gurgled merrily, dropping the forefinger and yawning. The girl
laid down her work to tuck a coverlet about her charge.
"I do not know," she admitted, her voice low.
Adriance drew a quick breath.
"That isn't all of it. The husband is the man's friend. Why, they used
to sleep together, eat together----! And he doesn't know. Don't you see,
the man has to fail either the husband or wife? How can you straighten
that?"
She looked up, to meet the unconscious self-betrayal of his defiant,
unhappy eyes.
"I am very sorry for him," she answered gravely. And, after a moment.
"She must be very clever."
He started away from the suggestion with sharp resentment. Clever--that
was his father's term for Lucille Masterson; and it was hateful to him.
He would not analyze why he felt that repugnance to hearing Lucille
called clever. He refused to consider what that implied, what ugly
depths of doubt were stirred in him to make him wince in anger and
humiliation. Suddenly he bitterly regretted having told the story to
this girl, even under the concealed identity.
"No doubt," he made a coldly vague rejoinder. "I dare say the matter
will work itself out well enough. It is getting late; I think I must
go."
It was altogether too abrupt, and he knew it. But he could do no better.
He knew the girl's eyes followed him away, and he walked with careful
ease and nonchalance.
Out of her sight, he walked more slowly. Already the autumn twilight was
settling down like a delicate gray veil. At the foot of the Palisades,
opposite, a familiar point of light sprang into view among the myriad
lights there; a point that ran like fire through tow, up, across, around
until the glittering words shone complete: "Adriance's Paper."
The name was reflected in the dark water. Down there, it swayed weakly
and its legend was broken by the river's ripples. "You shine, up there,
but I govern here," the Hudson flung its scorn back to the man-made
arrogance. He was like that reflection, Tony Adriance thought, with a
fancy caught from the girl's trick of imagery; he was the mere
reflection of his father's successes, shifting, worthless, inseparable
from the gold-colored reality above, dancing and broken on the current
of a woman's will. He himself was--nothing. He winced under the
self-applied lash. It was knotted with truth; he, personally, never had
counted. Even Lucille never had said she loved him; she simply had taken
his devotion for granted, and used it. Would she have promised herself
to him if he had been a poor man? Would she ever have contemplated
divorce from Masterson, with all his faults, if Tony Adriance had not
brought himself and his gilded possibilities across her path? The
questions were ugly, and sent the blood into his face. He stopped
walking and stood by the stone wall edging the sidewalk, facing the
river.
He always had resented being merely his father's heir, in a vague,
unanalyzed way. Now resentment threatened to flame into rebellion.
Rebellion against what? His father, who left him absolute freedom from
any restraint? Lucille, whom he was at perfect liberty never to see
again, if he chose to deny her assumption? He was very completely
trapped by circumstance, since the trap was open and yet he could not
leave it.
The delicate dot on the _i_ of irony was that he had loved Lucille, yet
he knew he must be miserable with her all their lives. He thought of her
even now with a certain longing, yet he would always distrust her and
detest himself. His fingers gripped the stone edge; he felt a passionate
envy of men who were strong enough to do insane, desperate things, to
tear their own way ruthlessly through the clinging web of other people's
ways. He fancied the girl in black to be such a person; if she
considered herself right in any course, she would take it.
But after a while he turned away and began to walk home. He had to
dress, for he was dining with the Mastersons. It had been insisted upon,
to make amends for the night he had stayed away to dine with his
father. Lucille was not yet ready for any audible whisper to suggest
divorce to the world or her husband. Tony must come and go as usual for
a few weeks more. She had chosen to forget his appeal, after quelling
his mutiny. Mrs. Masterson was not a generous victor.