DR. ARCHIE’S VENTURE
I
Dr. Howard Archie had come down to Denver for a meeting of the
stockholders in the San Felipe silver mine. It was not absolutely
necessary for him to come, but he had no very pressing cases at home.
Winter was closing down in Moonstone, and he dreaded the dullness of
it. On the 10th day of January, therefore, he was registered at the
Brown Palace Hotel. On the morning of the 11th he came down to
breakfast to find the streets white and the air thick with snow. A wild
northwester was blowing down from the mountains, one of those beautiful
storms that wrap Denver in dry, furry snow, and make the city a
loadstone to thousands of men in the mountains and on the plains. The
brakemen out on their box-cars, the miners up in their diggings, the
lonely homesteaders in the sand hills of Yucca and Kit Carson Counties,
begin to think of Denver, muffled in snow, full of food and drink and
good cheer, and to yearn for her with that admiration which makes her,
more than other American cities, an object of sentiment.
Howard Archie was glad he had got in before the storm came. He felt as
cheerful as if he had received a legacy that morning, and he greeted
the clerk with even greater friendliness than usual when he stopped at
the desk for his mail. In the dining-room he found several old friends
seated here and there before substantial breakfasts: cattlemen and
mining engineers from odd corners of the State, all looking fresh and
well pleased with themselves. He had a word with one and another before
he sat down at the little table by a window, where the Austrian head
waiter stood attentively behind a chair. After his breakfast was put
before him, the doctor began to run over his letters. There was one
directed in Thea Kronborg’s handwriting, forwarded from Moonstone. He
saw with astonishment, as he put another lump of sugar into his cup,
that this letter bore a New York postmark. He had known that Thea was
in Mexico, traveling with some Chicago people, but New York, to a
Denver man, seems much farther away than Mexico City. He put the letter
behind his plate, upright against the stem of his water goblet, and
looked at it thoughtfully while he drank his second cup of coffee. He
had been a little anxious about Thea; she had not written to him for a
long while.
As he never got good coffee at home, the doctor always drank three cups
for breakfast when he was in Denver. Oscar knew just when to bring him
a second pot, fresh and smoking. “And more cream, Oscar, please. You
know I like lots of cream,” the doctor murmured, as he opened the
square envelope, marked in the upper right-hand corner, “Everett House,
Union Square.” The text of the letter was as follows:—
DEAR DOCTOR ARCHIE:—
I have not written to you for a long time, but it has not been
unintentional. I could not write you frankly, and so I would not
write at all. I can be frank with you now, but not by letter. It is
a great deal to ask, but I wonder if you could come to New York to
help me out? I have got into difficulties, and I need your advice.
I need your friendship. I am afraid I must even ask you to lend me
money, if you can without serious inconvenience. I have to go to
Germany to study, and it can’t be put off any longer. My voice is
ready. Needless to say, I don’t want any word of this to reach my
family. They are the last people I would turn to, though I love my
mother dearly. If you can come, please telegraph me at this hotel.
Don’t despair of me. I’ll make it up to you yet.
Your old friend,
THEA KRONBORG.
This in a bold, jagged handwriting with a Gothic turn to the
letters,—something between a highly sophisticated hand and a very
unsophisticated one,—not in the least smooth or flowing.
The doctor bit off the end of a cigar nervously and read the letter
through again, fumbling distractedly in his pockets for matches, while
the waiter kept trying to call his attention to the box he had just
placed before him. At last Oscar came out, as if the idea had just
struck him, “Matches, sir?”
“Yes, thank you.” The doctor slipped a coin into his palm and rose,
crumpling Thea’s letter in his hand and thrusting the others into his
pocket unopened. He went back to the desk in the lobby and beckoned to
the clerk, upon whose kindness he threw himself apologetically.
“Harry, I’ve got to pull out unexpectedly. Call up the Burlington, will
you, and ask them to route me to New York the quickest way, and to let
us know. Ask for the hour I’ll get in. I have to wire.”
“Certainly, Dr. Archie. Have it for you in a minute.” The young man’s
pallid, clean-scraped face was all sympathetic interest as he reached
for the telephone. Dr. Archie put out his hand and stopped him.
“Wait a minute. Tell me, first, is Captain Harris down yet?”
“No, sir. The Captain hasn’t come down yet this morning.”
“I’ll wait here for him. If I don’t happen to catch him, nail him and
get me. Thank you, Harry.”
The doctor spoke gratefully and turned away. He began to pace the
lobby, his hands behind him, watching the bronze elevator doors like a
hawk. At last Captain Harris issued from one of them, tall and
imposing, wearing a Stetson and fierce mustaches, a fur coat on his
arm, a solitaire glittering upon his little finger and another in his
black satin ascot. He was one of the grand old bluffers of those good
old days. As gullible as a schoolboy, he had managed, with his sharp
eye and knowing air and twisted blond mustaches, to pass himself off
for an astute financier, and the Denver papers respectfully referred to
him as the Rothschild of Cripple Creek.
Dr. Archie stopped the Captain on his way to breakfast. “Must see you a
minute, Captain. Can’t wait. Want to sell you some shares in the San
Felipe. Got to raise money.”
The Captain grandly bestowed his hat upon an eager porter who had
already lifted his fur coat tenderly from his arm and stood nursing it.
In removing his hat, the Captain exposed a bald, flushed dome, thatched
about the ears with yellowish gray hair. “Bad time to sell, doctor. You
want to hold on to San Felipe, and buy more. What have you got to
raise?”
“Oh, not a great sum. Five or six thousand. I’ve been buying up close
and have run short.”
“I see, I see. Well, doctor, you’ll have to let me get through that
door. I was out last night, and I’m going to get my bacon, if you lose
your mine.” He clapped Archie on the shoulder and pushed him along in
front of him. “Come ahead with me, and we’ll talk business.”
Dr. Archie attended the Captain and waited while he gave his order,
taking the seat the old promoter indicated.
“Now, sir,” the Captain turned to him, “you don’t want to sell
anything. You must be under the impression that I’m one of these damned
New England sharks that get their pound of flesh off the widow and
orphan. If you’re a little short, sign a note and I’ll write a check.
That’s the way gentlemen do business. If you want to put up some San
Felipe as collateral, let her go, but I shan’t touch a share of it.
Pens and ink, please, Oscar,”—he lifted a large forefinger to the
Austrian.
The Captain took out his checkbook and a book of blank notes, and
adjusted his nose-nippers. He wrote a few words in one book and Archie
wrote a few in the other. Then they each tore across perforations and
exchanged slips of paper.
“That’s the way. Saves office rent,” the Captain commented with
satisfaction, returning the books to his pocket. “And now, Archie,
where are you off to?”
“Got to go East to-night. A deal waiting for me in New York.” Dr.
Archie rose.
The Captain’s face brightened as he saw Oscar approaching with a tray,
and he began tucking the corner of his napkin inside his collar, over
his ascot. “Don’t let them unload anything on you back there, doctor,”
he said genially, “and don’t let them relieve you of anything, either.
Don’t let them get any Cripple stuff off you. We can manage our own
silver out here, and we’re going to take it out by the ton, sir!”
The doctor left the dining-room, and after another consultation with
the clerk, he wrote his first telegram to Thea:—
Miss Thea Kronborg,
Everett House, New York.
Will call at your hotel eleven o’clock Friday morning. Glad to
come. Thank you.
ARCHIE
He stood and heard the message actually clicked off on the wire, with
the feeling that she was hearing the click at the other end. Then he
sat down in the lobby and wrote a note to his wife and one to the other
doctor in Moonstone. When he at last issued out into the storm, it was
with a feeling of elation rather than of anxiety. Whatever was wrong,
he could make it right. Her letter had practically said so.
He tramped about the snowy streets, from the bank to the Union Station,
where he shoved his money under the grating of the ticket window as if
he could not get rid of it fast enough. He had never been in New York,
never been farther east than Buffalo. “That’s rather a shame,” he
reflected boyishly as he put the long tickets in his pocket, “for a man
nearly forty years old.” However, he thought as he walked up toward the
club, he was on the whole glad that his first trip had a human
interest, that he was going for something, and because he was wanted.
He loved holidays. He felt as if he were going to Germany himself.
“Queer,”—he went over it with the snow blowing in his face,—“but that
sort of thing is more interesting than mines and making your daily
bread. It’s worth paying out to be in on it,—for a fellow like me. And
when it’s Thea—Oh, I back her!” he laughed aloud as he burst in at the
door of the Athletic Club, powdered with snow.
Archie sat down before the New York papers and ran over the
advertisements of hotels, but he was too restless to read. Probably he
had better get a new overcoat, and he was not sure about the shape of
his collars. “I don’t want to look different to her from everybody else
there,” he mused. “I guess I’ll go down and have Van look me over.
He’ll put me right.”
So he plunged out into the snow again and started for his tailor’s.
When he passed a florist’s shop he stopped and looked in at the window,
smiling; how naturally pleasant things recalled one another. At the
tailor’s he kept whistling, “Flow gently, Sweet Afton,” while Van Dusen
advised him, until that resourceful tailor and haberdasher exclaimed,
“You must have a date back there, doctor; you behave like a
bridegroom,” and made him remember that he wasn’t one.
Before he let him go, Van put his finger on the Masonic pin in his
client’s lapel. “Mustn’t wear that, doctor. Very bad form back there.”
II
Fred Ottenburg, smartly dressed for the afternoon, with a long black
coat and gaiters was sitting in the dusty parlor of the Everett House.
His manner was not in accord with his personal freshness, the good
lines of his clothes, and the shining smoothness of his hair. His
attitude was one of deep dejection, and his face, though it had the
cool, unimpeachable fairness possible only to a very blond young man,
was by no means happy. A page shuffled into the room and looked about.
When he made out the dark figure in a shadowy corner, tracing over the
carpet pattern with a cane, he droned, “The lady says you can come up,
sir.”
Fred picked up his hat and gloves and followed the creature, who seemed
an aged boy in uniform, through dark corridors that smelled of old
carpets. The page knocked at the door of Thea’s sitting-room, and then
wandered away. Thea came to the door with a telegram in her hand. She
asked Ottenburg to come in and pointed to one of the clumsy,
sullen-looking chairs that were as thick as they were high. The room
was brown with time, dark in spite of two windows that opened on Union
Square, with dull curtains and carpet, and heavy, respectable-looking
furniture in somber colors. The place was saved from utter dismalness
by a coal fire under the black marble mantelpiece,—brilliantly
reflected in a long mirror that hung between the two windows. This was
the first time Fred had seen the room, and he took it in quickly, as he
put down his hat and gloves.
Thea seated herself at the walnut writing-desk, still holding the slip
of yellow paper. “Dr. Archie is coming,” she said. “He will be here
Friday morning.”
“Well, that’s good, at any rate,” her visitor replied with a determined
effort at cheerfulness. Then, turning to the fire, he added blankly,
“If you want him.”
“Of course I want him. I would never have asked such a thing of him if
I hadn’t wanted him a great deal. It’s a very expensive trip.” Thea
spoke severely. Then she went on, in a milder tone. “He doesn’t say
anything about the money, but I think his coming means that he can let
me have it.”
Fred was standing before the mantel, rubbing his hands together
nervously. “Probably. You are still determined to call on him?” He sat
down tentatively in the chair Thea had indicated. “I don’t see why you
won’t borrow from me, and let him sign with you, for instance. That
would constitute a perfectly regular business transaction. I could
bring suit against either of you for my money.”
Thea turned toward him from the desk. “We won’t take that up again,
Fred. I should have a different feeling about it if I went on your
money. In a way I shall feel freer on Dr. Archie’s, and in another way
I shall feel more bound. I shall try even harder.” She paused. “He is
almost like my father,” she added irrelevantly.
“Still, he isn’t, you know,” Fred persisted. “It wouldn’t be anything
new. I’ve loaned money to students before, and got it back, too.”
“Yes; I know you’re generous,” Thea hurried over it, “but this will be
the best way. He will be here on Friday did I tell you?”
“I think you mentioned it. That’s rather soon. May I smoke?” he took
out a small cigarette case. “I suppose you’ll be off next week?” he
asked as he struck a match.
“Just as soon as I can,” she replied with a restless movement of her
arms, as if her dark-blue dress were too tight for her. “It seems as if
I’d been here forever.”
“And yet,” the young man mused, “we got in only four days ago. Facts
really don’t count for much, do they? It’s all in the way people feel:
even in little things.”
Thea winced, but she did not answer him. She put the telegram back in
its envelope and placed it carefully in one of the pigeonholes of the
desk.
“I suppose,” Fred brought out with effort, “that your friend is in your
confidence?”
“He always has been. I shall have to tell him about myself. I wish I
could without dragging you in.”
Fred shook himself. “Don’t bother about where you drag me, please,” he
put in, flushing. “I don’t give—” he subsided suddenly.
“I’m afraid,” Thea went on gravely, “that he won’t understand. He’ll be
hard on you.”
Fred studied the white ash of his cigarette before he flicked it off.
“You mean he’ll see me as even worse than I am. Yes, I suppose I shall
look very low to him: a fifthrate scoundrel. But that only matters in
so far as it hurts his feelings.”
Thea sighed. “We’ll both look pretty low. And after all, we must really
be just about as we shall look to him.”
Ottenburg started up and threw his cigarette into the grate. “That I
deny. Have you ever been really frank with this preceptor of your
childhood, even when you _were_ a child? Think a minute, have you? Of
course not! From your cradle, as I once told you, you’ve been ‘doing
it’ on the side, living your own life, admitting to yourself things
that would horrify him. You’ve always deceived him to the extent of
letting him think you different from what you are. He couldn’t
understand then, he can’t understand now. So why not spare yourself and
him?”
She shook her head. “Of course, I’ve had my own thoughts. Maybe he has
had his, too. But I’ve never done anything before that he would much
mind. I must put myself right with him,—as right as I can,—to begin
over. He’ll make allowances for me. He always has. But I’m afraid he
won’t for you.”
“Leave that to him and me. I take it you want me to see him?” Fred sat
down again and began absently to trace the carpet pattern with his
cane. “At the worst,” he spoke wanderingly, “I thought you’d perhaps
let me go in on the business end of it and invest along with you. You’d
put in your talent and ambition and hard work, and I’d put in the money
and—well, nobody’s good wishes are to be scorned, not even mine. Then,
when the thing panned out big, we could share together. Your doctor
friend hasn’t cared half so much about your future as I have.”
“He’s cared a good deal. He doesn’t know as much about such things as
you do. Of course you’ve been a great deal more help to me than any one
else ever has,” Thea said quietly. The black clock on the mantel began
to strike. She listened to the five strokes and then said, “I’d have
liked your helping me eight months ago. But now, you’d simply be
keeping me.”
“You weren’t ready for it eight months ago.” Fred leaned back at last
in his chair. “You simply weren’t ready for it. You were too tired. You
were too timid. Your whole tone was too low. You couldn’t rise from a
chair like that,”—she had started up apprehensively and gone toward the
window.—“You were fumbling and awkward. Since then you’ve come into
your personality. You were always locking horns with it before. You
were a sullen little drudge eight months ago, afraid of being caught at
either looking or moving like yourself. Nobody could tell anything
about you. A voice is not an instrument that’s found ready-made. A
voice is personality. It can be as big as a circus and as common as
dirt.—There’s good money in that kind, too, but I don’t happen to be
interested in them.—Nobody could tell much about what you might be able
to do, last winter. I divined more than anybody else.”
“Yes, I know you did.” Thea walked over to the oldfashioned mantel and
held her hands down to the glow of the fire. “I owe so much to you, and
that’s what makes things hard. That’s why I have to get away from you
altogether. I depend on you for so many things. Oh, I did even last
winter, in Chicago!” She knelt down by the grate and held her hands
closer to the coals. “And one thing leads to another.”
Ottenburg watched her as she bent toward the fire. His glance
brightened a little. “Anyhow, you couldn’t look as you do now, before
you knew me. You _were_ clumsy. And whatever you do now, you do
splendidly. And you can’t cry enough to spoil your face for more than
ten minutes. It comes right back, in spite of you. It’s only since
you’ve known me that you’ve let yourself be beautiful.”
Without rising she turned her face away. Fred went on impetuously. “Oh,
you can turn it away from me, Thea; you can take it away from me! All
the same—” his spurt died and he fell back. “How can you turn on me so,
after all!” he sighed.
“I haven’t. But when you arranged with yourself to take me in like
that, you couldn’t have been thinking very kindly of me. I can’t
understand how you carried it through, when I was so easy, and all the
circumstances were so easy.”
Her crouching position by the fire became threatening. Fred got up, and
Thea also rose.
“No,” he said, “I can’t make you see that now. Some time later,
perhaps, you will understand better. For one thing, I honestly could
not imagine that words, names, meant so much to you.” Fred was talking
with the desperation of a man who has put himself in the wrong and who
yet feels that there was an idea of truth in his conduct. “Suppose that
you had married your brakeman and lived with him year after year,
caring for him even less than you do for your doctor, or for Harsanyi.
I suppose you would have felt quite all right about it, because that
relation has a name in good standing. To me, that seems—sickening!” He
took a rapid turn about the room and then as Thea remained standing, he
rolled one of the elephantine chairs up to the hearth for her.
“Sit down and listen to me for a moment, Thea.” He began pacing from
the hearthrug to the window and back again, while she sat down
compliantly. “Don’t you know most of the people in the world are not
individuals at all? They never have an individual idea or experience. A
lot of girls go to boarding-school together, come out the same season,
dance at the same parties, are married off in groups, have their babies
at about the same time, send their children to school together, and so
the human crop renews itself. Such women know as much about the reality
of the forms they go through as they know about the wars they learn the
dates of. They get their most personal experiences out of novels and
plays. Everything is second-hand with them. Why, you _couldn’t_ live
like that.”
Thea sat looking toward the mantel, her eyes half closed, her chin
level, her head set as if she were enduring something. Her hands, very
white, lay passive on her dark gown. From the window corner Fred looked
at them and at her. He shook his head and flashed an angry, tormented
look out into the blue twilight over the Square, through which muffled
cries and calls and the clang of car bells came up from the street. He
turned again and began to pace the floor, his hands in his pockets.
“Say what you will, Thea Kronborg, you are not that sort of person. You
will never sit alone with a pacifier and a novel. You won’t subsist on
what the old ladies have put into the bottle for you. You will always
break through into the realities. That was the first thing Harsanyi
found out about you; that you couldn’t be kept on the outside. If you’d
lived in Moonstone all your life and got on with the discreet brakeman,
you’d have had just the same nature. Your children would have been the
realities then, probably. If they’d been commonplace, you’d have killed
them with driving. You’d have managed some way to live twenty times as
much as the people around you.”
Fred paused. He sought along the shadowy ceiling and heavy mouldings
for words. When he began again, his voice was lower, and at first he
spoke with less conviction, though again it grew on him. “Now I knew
all this—oh, knew it better than I can ever make you understand! You’ve
been running a handicap. You had no time to lose. I wanted you to have
what you need and to get on fast—get through with me, if need be; I
counted on that. You’ve no time to sit round and analyze your conduct
or your feelings. Other women give their whole lives to it. They’ve
nothing else to do. Helping a man to get his divorce is a career for
them; just the sort of intellectual exercise they like.”
Fred dived fiercely into his pockets as if he would rip them out and
scatter their contents to the winds. Stopping before her, he took a
deep breath and went on again, this time slowly. “All that sort of
thing is foreign to you. You’d be nowhere at it. You haven’t that kind
of mind. The grammatical niceties of conduct are dark to you. You’re
simple—and poetic.” Fred’s voice seemed to be wandering about in the
thickening dusk. “You won’t play much. You won’t, perhaps, love many
times.” He paused. “And you did love me, you know. Your railroad friend
would have understood me. I _could_ have thrown you back. The reverse
was there,—it stared me in the face,—but I couldn’t pull it. I let you
drive ahead.” He threw out his hands. What Thea noticed, oddly enough,
was the flash of the firelight on his cuff link. He turned again. “And
you’ll always drive ahead,” he muttered. “It’s your way.”
There was a long silence. Fred had dropped into a chair. He seemed,
after such an explosion, not to have a word left in him. Thea put her
hand to the back of her neck and pressed it, as if the muscles there
were aching.
“Well,” she said at last, “I at least overlook more in you than I do in
myself. I am always excusing you to myself. I don’t do much else.”
“Then why, in Heaven’s name, won’t you let me be your friend? You make
a scoundrel of me, borrowing money from another man to get out of my
clutches.”
“If I borrow from him, it’s to study. Anything I took from you would be
different. As I said before, you’d be keeping me.”
“Keeping! I like your language. It’s pure Moonstone, Thea,—like your
point of view. I wonder how long you’ll be a Methodist.” He turned away
bitterly.
“Well, I’ve never said I wasn’t Moonstone, have I? I am, and that’s why
I want Dr. Archie. I can’t see anything so funny about Moonstone, you
know.” She pushed her chair back a little from the hearth and clasped
her hands over her knee, still looking thoughtfully into the red coals.
“We always come back to the same thing, Fred. The name, as you call it,
makes a difference to me how I feel about myself. You would have acted
very differently with a girl of your own kind, and that’s why I can’t
take anything from you now. You’ve made everything impossible. Being
married is one thing and not being married is the other thing, and
that’s all there is to it. I can’t see how you reasoned with yourself,
if you took the trouble to reason. You say I was too much alone, and
yet what you did was to cut me off more than I ever had been. Now I’m
going to try to make good to my friends out there. That’s all there is
left for me.”
“Make good to your friends!” Fred burst out. “What one of them cares as
I care, or believes as I believe? I’ve told you I’ll never ask a
gracious word from you until I can ask it with all the churches in
Christendom at my back.”
Thea looked up, and when she saw Fred’s face, she thought sadly that
he, too, looked as if things were spoiled for him. “If you know me as
well as you say you do, Fred,” she said slowly, “then you are not being
honest with yourself. You know that I can’t do things halfway. If you
kept me at all—you’d keep me.” She dropped her head wearily on her hand
and sat with her forehead resting on her fingers.
Fred leaned over her and said just above his breath, “Then, when I get
that divorce, you’ll take it up with me again? You’ll at least let me
know, warn me, before there is a serious question of anybody else?”
Without lifting her head, Thea answered him. “Oh, I don’t think there
will ever be a question of anybody else. Not if I can help it. I
suppose I’ve given you every reason to think there will be,—at once, on
shipboard, any time.”
Ottenburg drew himself up like a shot. “Stop it, Thea!” he said
sharply. “That’s one thing you’ve never done. That’s like any common
woman.” He saw her shoulders lift a little and grow calm. Then he went
to the other side of the room and took up his hat and gloves from the
sofa. He came back cheerfully. “I didn’t drop in to bully you this
afternoon. I came to coax you to go out for tea with me somewhere.” He
waited, but she did not look up or lift her head, still sunk on her
hand.
Her handkerchief had fallen. Fred picked it up and put it on her knee,
pressing her fingers over it. “Good-night, dear and wonderful,” he
whispered,—“wonderful and dear! How can you ever get away from me when
I will always follow you, through every wall, through every door,
wherever you go.” He looked down at her bent head, and the curve of her
neck that was so sad. He stooped, and with his lips just touched her
hair where the firelight made it ruddiest. “I didn’t know I had it in
me, Thea. I thought it was all a fairy tale. I don’t know myself any
more.” He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “The salt’s all gone out
of your hair. It’s full of sun and wind again. I believe it has
memories.” Again she heard him take a deep breath. “I could do without
you for a lifetime, if that would give you to yourself. A woman like
you doesn’t find herself, alone.”
She thrust her free hand up to him. He kissed it softly, as if she were
asleep and he were afraid of waking her.
From the door he turned back irrelevantly. “As to your old friend,
Thea, if he’s to be here on Friday, why,”—he snatched out his watch and
held it down to catch the light from the grate,—“he’s on the train now!
That ought to cheer you. Good-night.” She heard the door close.
III
On Friday afternoon Thea Kronborg was walking excitedly up and down her
sitting-room, which at that hour was flooded by thin, clear sunshine.
Both windows were open, and the fire in the grate was low, for the day
was one of those false springs that sometimes blow into New York from
the sea in the middle of winter, soft, warm, with a persuasive salty
moisture in the air and a relaxing thaw under foot. Thea was flushed
and animated, and she seemed as restless as the sooty sparrows that
chirped and cheeped distractingly about the windows. She kept looking
at the black clock, and then down into the Square. The room was full of
flowers, and she stopped now and then to arrange them or to move them
into the sunlight. After the bellboy came to announce a visitor, she
took some Roman hyacinths from a glass and stuck them in the front of
her dark-blue dress.
When at last Fred Ottenburg appeared in the doorway, she met him with
an exclamation of pleasure. “I am glad you’ve come, Fred. I was afraid
you might not get my note, and I wanted to see you before you see Dr.
Archie. He’s so nice!” She brought her hands together to emphasize her
statement.
“Is he? I’m glad. You see I’m quite out of breath. I didn’t wait for
the elevator, but ran upstairs. I was so pleased at being sent for.” He
dropped his hat and overcoat. “Yes, I should say he is nice! I don’t
seem to recognize all of these,” waving his handkerchief about at the
flowers.
“Yes, he brought them himself, in a big box. He brought lots with him
besides flowers. Oh, lots of things! The old Moonstone feeling,”—Thea
moved her hand back and forth in the air, fluttering her fingers,—“the
feeling of starting out, early in the morning, to take my lesson.”
“And you’ve had everything out with him?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Haven’t?” He looked up in consternation.
“No, I haven’t!” Thea spoke excitedly, moving about over the sunny
patches on the grimy carpet. “I’ve lied to him, just as you said I had
always lied to him, and that’s why I’m so happy. I’ve let him think
what he likes to think. Oh, I couldn’t do anything else, Fred,”—she
shook her head emphatically. “If you’d seen him when he came in, so
pleased and excited! You see this is a great adventure for him. From
the moment I began to talk to him, he entreated me not to say too much,
not to spoil his notion of me. Not in so many words, of course. But if
you’d seen his eyes, his face, his kind hands! Oh, no! I couldn’t.” She
took a deep breath, as if with a renewed sense of her narrow escape.
“Then, what did you tell him?” Fred demanded.
Thea sat down on the edge of the sofa and began shutting and opening
her hands nervously. “Well, I told him enough, and not too much. I told
him all about how good you were to me last winter, getting me
engagements and things, and how you had helped me with my work more
than anybody. Then I told him about how you sent me down to the ranch
when I had no money or anything.” She paused and wrinkled her forehead.
“And I told him that I wanted to marry you and ran away to Mexico with
you, and that I was awfully happy until you told me that you couldn’t
marry me because—well, I told him why.” Thea dropped her eyes and moved
the toe of her shoe about restlessly on the carpet.
“And he took it from you, like that?” Fred asked, almost with awe.
“Yes, just like that, and asked no questions. He was hurt; he had some
wretched moments. I could see him squirming and squirming and trying to
get past it. He kept shutting his eyes and rubbing his forehead. But
when I told him that I absolutely knew you wanted to marry me, that you
would whenever you could, that seemed to help him a good deal.”
“And that satisfied him?” Fred asked wonderingly. He could not quite
imagine what kind of person Dr. Archie might be.
“He took me by the shoulders once and asked, oh, in such a frightened
way, ‘Thea, was he _good_ to you, this young man?’ When I told him you
were, he looked at me again: ‘And you care for him a great deal, you
believe in him?’ Then he seemed satisfied.” Thea paused. “You see, he’s
just tremendously good, and tremendously afraid of things—of some
things. Otherwise he would have got rid of Mrs. Archie.” She looked up
suddenly: “You were right, though; one can’t tell people about things
they don’t know already.”
Fred stood in the window, his back to the sunlight, fingering the
jonquils. “Yes, you can, my dear. But you must tell it in such a way
that they don’t know you’re telling it, and that they don’t know
they’re hearing it.”
Thea smiled past him, out into the air. “I see. It’s a secret. Like the
sound in the shell.”
“What’s that?” Fred was watching her and thinking how moving that
faraway expression, in her, happened to be. “What did you say?”
She came back. “Oh, something old and Moonstony! I have almost
forgotten it myself. But I feel better than I thought I ever could
again. I can’t wait to be off. Oh, Fred,” she sprang up, “I want to get
at it!”
As she broke out with this, she threw up her head and lifted herself a
little on her toes. Fred colored and looked at her fearfully,
hesitatingly. Her eyes, which looked out through the window, were
bright—they had no memories. No, she did not remember. That momentary
elevation had no associations for her. It was unconscious.
He looked her up and down and laughed and shook his head. “You are just
all I want you to be—and that is,—not for me! Don’t worry, you’ll get
at it. You are at it. My God! have you ever, for one moment, been at
anything else?”
Thea did not answer him, and clearly she had not heard him. She was
watching something out in the thin light of the false spring and its
treacherously soft air.
Fred waited a moment. “Are you going to dine with your friend
to-night?”
“Yes. He has never been in New York before. He wants to go about. Where
shall I tell him to go?”
“Wouldn’t it be a better plan, since you wish me to meet him, for you
both to dine with me? It would seem only natural and friendly. You’ll
have to live up a little to his notion of us.” Thea seemed to consider
the suggestion favorably. “If you wish him to be easy in his mind,”
Fred went on, “that would help. I think, myself, that we are rather
nice together. Put on one of the new dresses you got down there, and
let him see how lovely you can be. You owe him some pleasure, after all
the trouble he has taken.”
Thea laughed, and seemed to find the idea exciting and pleasant. “Oh,
very well! I’ll do my best. Only don’t wear a dress coat, please. He
hasn’t one, and he’s nervous about it.”
Fred looked at his watch. “Your monument up there is fast. I’ll be here
with a cab at eight. I’m anxious to meet him. You’ve given me the
strangest idea of his callow innocence and aged indifference.”
She shook her head. “No, he’s none of that. He’s very good, and he
won’t admit things. I love him for it. Now, as I look back on it, I see
that I’ve always, even when I was little, shielded him.”
As she laughed, Fred caught the bright spark in her eye that he knew so
well, and held it for a happy instant. Then he blew her a kiss with his
finger-tips and fled.
IV
At nine o’clock that evening our three friends were seated in the
balcony of a French restaurant, much gayer and more intimate than any
that exists in New York to-day. This old restaurant was built by a
lover of pleasure, who knew that to dine gayly human beings must have
the reassurance of certain limitations of space and of a certain
definite style; that the walls must be near enough to suggest shelter,
the ceiling high enough to give the chandeliers a setting. The place
was crowded with the kind of people who dine late and well, and Dr.
Archie, as he watched the animated groups in the long room below the
balcony, found this much the most festive scene he had ever looked out
upon. He said to himself, in a jovial mood somewhat sustained by the
cheer of the board, that this evening alone was worth his long journey.
He followed attentively the orchestra, ensconced at the farther end of
the balcony, and told Thea it made him feel “quite musical” to
recognize “The Invitation to the Dance” or “The Blue Danube,” and that
he could remember just what kind of day it was when he heard her
practicing them at home, and lingered at the gate to listen.
For the first few moments, when he was introduced to young Ottenburg in
the parlor of the Everett House, the doctor had been awkward and
unbending. But Fred, as his father had often observed, “was not a good
mixer for nothing.” He had brought Dr. Archie around during the short
cab ride, and in an hour they had become old friends.
From the moment when the doctor lifted his glass and, looking
consciously at Thea, said, “To your success,” Fred liked him. He felt
his quality; understood his courage in some directions and what Thea
called his timidity in others, his unspent and miraculously preserved
youthfulness. Men could never impose upon the doctor, he guessed, but
women always could. Fred liked, too, the doctor’s manner with Thea, his
bashful admiration and the little hesitancy by which he betrayed his
consciousness of the change in her. It was just this change that, at
present, interested Fred more than anything else. That, he felt, was
his “created value,” and it was his best chance for any peace of mind.
If that were not real, obvious to an old friend like Archie, then he
cut a very poor figure, indeed.
Fred got a good deal, too, out of their talk about Moonstone. From her
questions and the doctor’s answers he was able to form some conception
of the little world that was almost the measure of Thea’s experience,
the one bit of the human drama that she had followed with sympathy and
understanding. As the two ran over the list of their friends, the mere
sound of a name seemed to recall volumes to each of them, to indicate
mines of knowledge and observation they had in common. At some names
they laughed delightedly, at some indulgently and even tenderly.
“You two young people must come out to Moonstone when Thea gets back,”
the doctor said hospitably.
“Oh, we shall!” Fred caught it up. “I’m keen to know all these people.
It is very tantalizing to hear only their names.”
“Would they interest an outsider very much, do you think, Dr. Archie?”
Thea leaned toward him. “Isn’t it only because we’ve known them since I
was little?”
The doctor glanced at her deferentially. Fred had noticed that he
seemed a little afraid to look at her squarely—perhaps a trifle
embarrassed by a mode of dress to which he was unaccustomed. “Well, you
are practically an outsider yourself, Thea, now,” he observed smiling.
“Oh, I know,” he went on quickly in response to her gesture of
protest,—“I know you don’t change toward your old friends, but you can
see us all from a distance now. It’s all to your advantage that you can
still take your old interest, isn’t it, Mr. Ottenburg?”
“That’s exactly one of her advantages, Dr. Archie. Nobody can ever take
that away from her, and none of us who came later can ever hope to
rival Moonstone in the impression we make. Her scale of values will
always be the Moonstone scale. And, with an artist, that _is_ an
advantage.” Fred nodded.
Dr. Archie looked at him seriously. “You mean it keeps them from
getting affected?”
“Yes; keeps them from getting off the track generally.”
While the waiter filled the glasses, Fred pointed out to Thea a big
black French barytone who was eating anchovies by their tails at one of
the tables below, and the doctor looked about and studied his fellow
diners.
“Do you know, Mr. Ottenburg,” he said deeply, “these people all look
happier to me than our Western people do. Is it simply good manners on
their part, or do they get more out of life?”
Fred laughed to Thea above the glass he had just lifted. “Some of them
are getting a good deal out of it now, doctor. This is the hour when
bench-joy brightens.”
Thea chuckled and darted him a quick glance. “Benchjoy! Where did you
get that slang?”
“That happens to be very old slang, my dear. Older than Moonstone or
the sovereign State of Colorado. Our old friend Mr. Nathanmeyer could
tell us why it happens to hit you.” He leaned forward and touched
Thea’s wrist, “See that fur coat just coming in, Thea. It’s D’Albert.
He’s just back from his Western tour. Fine head, hasn’t he?”
“To go back,” said Dr. Archie; “I insist that people do look happier
here. I’ve noticed it even on the street, and especially in the
hotels.”
Fred turned to him cheerfully. “New York people live a good deal in the
fourth dimension, Dr. Archie. It’s that you notice in their faces.”
The doctor was interested. “The fourth dimension,” he repeated slowly;
“and is that slang, too?”
“No,”—Fred shook his head,—“that’s merely a figure. I mean that life is
not quite so personal here as it is in your part of the world. People
are more taken up by hobbies, interests that are less subject to
reverses than their personal affairs. If you’re interested in Thea’s
voice, for instance, or in voices in general, that interest is just the
same, even if your mining stocks go down.”
The doctor looked at him narrowly. “You think that’s about the
principal difference between country people and city people, don’t
you?”
Fred was a little disconcerted at being followed up so resolutely, and
he attempted to dismiss it with a pleasantry. “I’ve never thought much
about it, doctor. But I should say, on the spur of the moment, that
that is one of the principal differences between people anywhere. It’s
the consolation of fellows like me who don’t accomplish much. The
fourth dimension is not good for business, but we think we have a
better time.”
Dr. Archie leaned back in his chair. His heavy shoulders were
contemplative. “And she,” he said slowly; “should you say that she is
one of the kind you refer to?” He inclined his head toward the shimmer
of the pale-green dress beside him. Thea was leaning, just then, over
the balcony rail, her head in the light from the chandeliers below.
“Never, never!” Fred protested. “She’s as hard-headed as the worst of
you—with a difference.”
The doctor sighed. “Yes, with a difference; something that makes a good
many revolutions to the second. When she was little I used to feel her
head to try to locate it.”
Fred laughed. “Did you, though? So you were on the track of it? Oh,
it’s there! We can’t get round it, miss,” as Thea looked back
inquiringly. “Dr. Archie, there’s a fellow townsman of yours I feel a
real kinship for.” He pressed a cigar upon Dr. Archie and struck a
match for him. “Tell me about Spanish Johnny.”
The doctor smiled benignantly through the first waves of smoke. “Well,
Johnny’s an old patient of mine, and he’s an old admirer of Thea’s. She
was born a cosmopolitan, and I expect she learned a good deal from
Johnny when she used to run away and go to Mexican Town. We thought it
a queer freak then.”
The doctor launched into a long story, in which he was often eagerly
interrupted or joyously confirmed by Thea, who was drinking her coffee
and forcing open the petals of the roses with an ardent and rather rude
hand. Fred settled down into enjoying his comprehension of his guests.
Thea, watching Dr. Archie and interested in his presentation, was
unconsciously impersonating her suave, gold-tinted friend. It was
delightful to see her so radiant and responsive again. She had kept her
promise about looking her best; when one could so easily get together
the colors of an apple branch in early spring, that was not hard to do.
Even Dr. Archie felt, each time he looked at her, a fresh
consciousness. He recognized the fine texture of her mother’s skin,
with the difference that, when she reached across the table to give him
a bunch of grapes, her arm was not only white, but somehow a little
dazzling. She seemed to him taller, and freer in all her movements. She
had now a way of taking a deep breath when she was interested, that
made her seem very strong, somehow, and brought her at one quite
overpoweringly. If he seemed shy, it was not that he was intimidated by
her worldly clothes, but that her greater positiveness, her whole
augmented self, made him feel that his accustomed manner toward her was
inadequate.
Fred, on his part, was reflecting that the awkward position in which he
had placed her would not confine or chafe her long. She looked about at
other people, at other women, curiously. She was not quite sure of
herself, but she was not in the least afraid or apologetic. She seemed
to sit there on the edge, emerging from one world into another, taking
her bearings, getting an idea of the concerted movement about her, but
with absolute self-confidence. So far from shrinking, she expanded. The
mere kindly effort to please Dr. Archie was enough to bring her out.
There was much talk of aurae at that time, and Fred mused that every
beautiful, every compellingly beautiful woman, had an aura, whether
other people did or no. There was, certainly, about the woman he had
brought up from Mexico, such an emanation. She existed in more space
than she occupied by measurement. The enveloping air about her head and
shoulders was subsidized—was more moving than she herself, for in it
lived the awakenings, all the first sweetness that life kills in
people. One felt in her such a wealth of _Jugendzeit_, all those
flowers of the mind and the blood that bloom and perish by the myriad
in the few exhaustless years when the imagination first kindles. It was
in watching her as she emerged like this, in being near and not too
near, that one got, for a moment, so much that one had lost; among
other legendary things the legendary theme of the absolutely magical
power of a beautiful woman.
After they had left Thea at her hotel, Dr. Archie admitted to Fred, as
they walked up Broadway through the rapidly chilling air, that once
before he had seen their young friend flash up into a more potent self,
but in a darker mood. It was in his office one night, when she was at
home the summer before last. “And then I got the idea,” he added
simply, “that she would not live like other people: that, for better or
worse, she had uncommon gifts.”
“Oh, we’ll see that it’s for better, you and I,” Fred reassured him.
“Won’t you come up to my hotel with me? I think we ought to have a long
talk.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Dr. Archie gratefully; “I think we ought.”
V
Thea was to sail on Tuesday, at noon, and on Saturday Fred Ottenburg
arranged for her passage, while she and Dr. Archie went shopping. With
rugs and sea-clothes she was already provided; Fred had got everything
of that sort she needed for the voyage up from Vera Cruz. On Sunday
afternoon Thea went to see the Harsanyis. When she returned to her
hotel, she found a note from Ottenburg, saying that he had called and
would come again to-morrow.
On Monday morning, while she was at breakfast, Fred came in. She knew
by his hurried, distracted air as he entered the dining-room that
something had gone wrong. He had just got a telegram from home. His
mother had been thrown from her carriage and hurt; a concussion of some
sort, and she was unconscious. He was leaving for St. Louis that night
on the eleven o’clock train. He had a great deal to attend to during
the day. He would come that evening, if he might, and stay with her
until train time, while she was doing her packing. Scarcely waiting for
her consent, he hurried away.
All day Thea was somewhat cast down. She was sorry for Fred, and she
missed the feeling that she was the one person in his mind. He had
scarcely looked at her when they exchanged words at the
breakfast-table. She felt as if she were set aside, and she did not
seem so important even to herself as she had yesterday. Certainly, she
reflected, it was high time that she began to take care of herself
again. Dr. Archie came for dinner, but she sent him away early, telling
him that she would be ready to go to the boat with him at half-past ten
the next morning. When she went upstairs, she looked gloomily at the
open trunk in her sitting-room, and at the trays piled on the sofa. She
stood at the window and watched a quiet snowstorm spending itself over
the city. More than anything else, falling snow always made her think
of Moonstone; of the Kohlers’ garden, of Thor’s sled, of dressing by
lamplight and starting off to school before the paths were broken.
When Fred came, he looked tired, and he took her hand almost without
seeing her.
“I’m so sorry, Fred. Have you had any more word?”
“She was still unconscious at four this afternoon. It doesn’t look very
encouraging.” He approached the fire and warmed his hands. He seemed to
have contracted, and he had not at all his habitual ease of manner.
“Poor mother!” he exclaimed; “nothing like this should have happened to
her. She has so much pride of person. She’s not at all an old woman,
you know. She’s never got beyond vigorous and rather dashing middle
age.” He turned abruptly to Thea and for the first time really looked
at her. “How badly things come out! She’d have liked you for a
daughter-in-law. Oh, you’d have fought like the devil, but you’d have
respected each other.” He sank into a chair and thrust his feet out to
the fire. “Still,” he went on thoughtfully, seeming to address the
ceiling, “it might have been bad for you. Our big German houses, our
good German cooking—you might have got lost in the upholstery. That
substantial comfort might take the temper out of you, dull your edge.
Yes,” he sighed, “I guess you were meant for the jolt of the breakers.”
“I guess I’ll get plenty of jolt,” Thea murmured, turning to her trunk.
“I’m rather glad I’m not staying over until to-morrow,” Fred reflected.
“I think it’s easier for me to glide out like this. I feel now as if
everything were rather casual, anyhow. A thing like that dulls one’s
feelings.”
Thea, standing by her trunk, made no reply. Presently he shook himself
and rose. “Want me to put those trays in for you?”
“No, thank you. I’m not ready for them yet.”
Fred strolled over to the sofa, lifted a scarf from one of the trays
and stood abstractedly drawing it through his fingers. “You’ve been so
kind these last few days, Thea, that I began to hope you might soften a
little; that you might ask me to come over and see you this summer.”
“If you thought that, you were mistaken,” she said slowly. “I’ve
hardened, if anything. But I shan’t carry any grudge away with me, if
you mean that.”
He dropped the scarf. “And there’s nothing—nothing at all you’ll let me
do?”
“Yes, there is one thing, and it’s a good deal to ask. If I get knocked
out, or never get on, I’d like you to see that Dr. Archie gets his
money back. I’m taking three thousand dollars of his.”
“Why, of course I shall. You may dismiss that from your mind. How fussy
you are about money, Thea. You make such a point of it.” He turned
sharply and walked to the windows.
Thea sat down in the chair he had quitted. “It’s only poor people who
feel that way about money, and who are really honest,” she said
gravely. “Sometimes I think that to be really honest, you must have
been so poor that you’ve been tempted to steal.”
“To what?”
“To steal. I used to be, when I first went to Chicago and saw all the
things in the big stores there. Never anything big, but little things,
the kind I’d never seen before and could never afford. I did take
something once, before I knew it.”
Fred came toward her. For the first time she had his whole attention,
in the degree to which she was accustomed to having it. “Did you? What
was it?” he asked with interest.
“A sachet. A little blue silk bag of orris-root powder. There was a
whole counterful of them, marked down to fifty cents. I’d never seen
any before, and they seemed irresistible. I took one up and wandered
about the store with it. Nobody seemed to notice, so I carried it off.”
Fred laughed. “Crazy child! Why, your things always smell of orris; is
it a penance?”
“No, I love it. But I saw that the firm didn’t lose anything by me. I
went back and bought it there whenever I had a quarter to spend. I got
a lot to take to Arizona. I made it up to them.”
“I’ll bet you did!” Fred took her hand. “Why didn’t I find you that
first winter? I’d have loved you just as you came!”
Thea shook her head. “No, you wouldn’t, but you might have found me
amusing. The Harsanyis said yesterday afternoon that I wore such a
funny cape and that my shoes always squeaked. They think I’ve improved.
I told them it was your doing if I had, and then they looked scared.”
“Did you sing for Harsanyi?”
“Yes. He thinks I’ve improved there, too. He said nice things to me.
Oh, he was very nice! He agrees with you about my going to Lehmann, if
she’ll take me. He came out to the elevator with me, after we had said
good-bye. He said something nice out there, too, but he seemed sad.”
“What was it that he said?”
“He said, ‘When people, serious people, believe in you, they give you
some of their best, so—take care of it, Miss Kronborg.’ Then he waved
his hands and went back.”
“If you sang, I wish you had taken me along. Did you sing well?” Fred
turned from her and went back to the window. “I wonder when I shall
hear you sing again.” He picked up a bunch of violets and smelled them.
“You know, your leaving me like this—well, it’s almost inhuman to be
able to do it so kindly and unconditionally.”
“I suppose it is. It was almost inhuman to be able to leave home,
too,—the last time, when I knew it was for good. But all the same, I
cared a great deal more than anybody else did. I lived through it. I
have no choice now. No matter how much it breaks me up, I have to go.
Do I seem to enjoy it?”
Fred bent over her trunk and picked up something which proved to be a
score, clumsily bound. “What’s this? Did you ever try to sing this?” He
opened it and on the engraved title-page read Wunsch’s inscription,
“_Einst, O Wunder!_” He looked up sharply at Thea.
“Wunsch gave me that when he went away. I’ve told you about him, my old
teacher in Moonstone. He loved that opera.”
Fred went toward the fireplace, the book under his arm, singing
softly:—
“Einst, O Wunder, entblüht auf meinem Grabe,
Eine Blume der Asche meines Herzens;”
“You have no idea at all where he is, Thea?” He leaned against the
mantel and looked down at her.
“No, I wish I had. He may be dead by this time. That was five years
ago, and he used himself hard. Mrs. Kohler was always afraid he would
die off alone somewhere and be stuck under the prairie. When we last
heard of him, he was in Kansas.”
“If he were to be found, I’d like to do something for him. I seem to
get a good deal of him from this.” He opened the book again, where he
kept the place with his finger, and scrutinized the purple ink. “How
like a German! Had he ever sung the song for you?”
“No. I didn’t know where the words were from until once, when Harsanyi
sang it for me, I recognized them.”
Fred closed the book. “Let me see, what was your noble brakeman’s
name?”
Thea looked up with surprise. “Ray, Ray Kennedy.”
“Ray Kennedy!” he laughed. “It couldn’t well have been better! Wunsch
and Dr. Archie, and Ray, and I,”—he told them off on his fingers,—“your
whistling-posts! You haven’t done so badly. We’ve backed you as we
could, some in our weakness and some in our might. In your dark
hours—and you’ll have them—you may like to remember us.” He smiled
whimsically and dropped the score into the trunk. “You are taking that
with you?”
“Surely I am. I haven’t so many keepsakes that I can afford to leave
that. I haven’t got many that I value so highly.”
“That you value so highly?” Fred echoed her gravity playfully. “You are
delicious when you fall into your vernacular.” He laughed half to
himself.
“What’s the matter with that? Isn’t it perfectly good English?”
“Perfectly good Moonstone, my dear. Like the readymade clothes that
hang in the windows, made to fit everybody and fit nobody, a phrase
that can be used on all occasions. Oh,”—he started across the room
again,—“that’s one of the fine things about your going! You’ll be with
the right sort of people and you’ll learn a good, live, warm German,
that will be like yourself. You’ll get a new speech full of shades and
color like your voice; alive, like your mind. It will be almost like
being born again, Thea.”
She was not offended. Fred had said such things to her before, and she
wanted to learn. In the natural course of things she would never have
loved a man from whom she could not learn a great deal.
“Harsanyi said once,” she remarked thoughtfully, “that if one became an
artist one had to be born again, and that one owed nothing to anybody.”
“Exactly. And when I see you again I shall not see you, but your
daughter. May I?” He held up his cigarette case questioningly and then
began to smoke, taking up again the song which ran in his head:—
“Deutlich schimmert auf jedem, Purpurblättchen, Adelaide!”
“I have half an hour with you yet, and then, exit Fred.” He walked
about the room, smoking and singing the words under his breath. “You’ll
like the voyage,” he said abruptly. “That first approach to a foreign
shore, stealing up on it and finding it—there’s nothing like it. It
wakes up everything that’s asleep in you. You won’t mind my writing to
some people in Berlin? They’ll be nice to you.”
“I wish you would.” Thea gave a deep sigh. “I wish one could look ahead
and see what is coming to one.”
“Oh, no!” Fred was smoking nervously; “that would never do. It’s the
uncertainty that makes one try. You’ve never had any sort of chance,
and now I fancy you’ll make it up to yourself. You’ll find the way to
let yourself out in one long flight.”
Thea put her hand on her heart. “And then drop like the rocks we used
to throw—anywhere.” She left the chair and went over to the sofa,
hunting for something in the trunk trays. When she came back she found
Fred sitting in her place. “Here are some handkerchiefs of yours. I’ve
kept one or two. They’re larger than mine and useful if one has a
headache.”
“Thank you. How nicely they smell of your things!” He looked at the
white squares for a moment and then put them in his pocket. He kept the
low chair, and as she stood beside him he took her hands and sat
looking intently at them, as if he were examining them for some special
purpose, tracing the long round fingers with the tips of his own.
“Ordinarily, you know, there are reefs that a man catches to and keeps
his nose above water. But this is a case by itself. There seems to be
no limit as to how much I can be in love with you. I keep going.” He
did not lift his eyes from her fingers, which he continued to study
with the same fervor. “Every kind of stringed instrument there is plays
in your hands, Thea,” he whispered, pressing them to his face.
She dropped beside him and slipped into his arms, shutting her eyes and
lifting her cheek to his. “Tell me one thing,” Fred whispered. “You
said that night on the boat, when I first told you, that if you could
you would crush it all up in your hands and throw it into the sea.
Would you, all those weeks?”
She shook her head.
“Answer me, would you?”
“No, I was angry then. I’m not now. I’d never give them up. Don’t make
me pay too much.” In that embrace they lived over again all the others.
When Thea drew away from him, she dropped her face in her hands. “You
are good to me,” she breathed, “you are!”
Rising to his feet, he put his hands under her elbows and lifted her
gently. He drew her toward the door with him. “Get all you can. Be
generous with yourself. Don’t stop short of splendid things. I want
them for you more than I want anything else, more than I want one
splendid thing for myself. I can’t help feeling that you’ll gain,
somehow, by my losing so much. That you’ll gain the very thing I lose.
Take care of her, as Harsanyi said. She’s wonderful!” He kissed her and
went out of the door without looking back, just as if he were coming
again to-morrow.
Thea went quickly into her bedroom. She brought out an armful of muslin
things, knelt down, and began to lay them in the trays. Suddenly she
stopped, dropped forward and leaned against the open trunk, her head on
her arms. The tears fell down on the dark old carpet. It came over her
how many people must have said good-bye and been unhappy in that room.
Other people, before her time, had hired this room to cry in. Strange
rooms and strange streets and faces, how sick at heart they made one!
Why was she going so far, when what she wanted was some familiar place
to hide in?—the rock house, her little room in Moonstone, her own bed.
Oh, how good it would be to lie down in that little bed, to cut the
nerve that kept one struggling, that pulled one on and on, to sink into
peace there, with all the family safe and happy downstairs. After all,
she was a Moonstone girl, one of the preacher’s children. Everything
else was in Fred’s imagination. Why was she called upon to take such
chances? Any safe, humdrum work that did not compromise her would be
better. But if she failed now, she would lose her soul. There was
nowhere to fall, after one took that step, except into abysses of
wretchedness. She knew what abysses, for she could still hear the old
man playing in the snowstorm, “_Ach, ich habe sie verloren!_” That
melody was released in her like a passion of longing. Every nerve in
her body thrilled to it. It brought her to her feet, carried her
somehow to bed and into troubled sleep.
That night she taught in Moonstone again: she beat her pupils in
hideous rages, she kept on beating them. She sang at funerals, and
struggled at the piano with Harsanyi. In one dream she was looking into
a hand-glass and thinking that she was getting better-looking, when the
glass began to grow smaller and smaller and her own reflection to
shrink, until she realized that she was looking into Ray Kennedy’s
eyes, seeing her face in that look of his which she could never forget.
All at once the eyes were Fred Ottenburg’s, and not Ray’s. All night
she heard the shrieking of trains, whistling in and out of Moonstone,
as she used to hear them in her sleep when they blew shrill in the
winter air. But to-night they were terrifying,—the spectral, fated
trains that “raced with death,” about which the old woman from the
depot used to pray.
In the morning she wakened breathless after a struggle with Mrs. Livery
Johnson’s daughter. She started up with a bound, threw the blankets
back and sat on the edge of the bed, her night-dress open, her long
braids hanging over her bosom, blinking at the daylight. After all, it
was not too late. She was only twenty years old, and the boat sailed at
noon. There was still time!